I want to rent an 80 to 120-quart boiling pot (with basket) and a burner for the same. Here’s a picture of the sort of pot I mean. I want to rent these as near to Pasadena, CA, as possible, but anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area is fine.
I’m having trouble finding a source. There are plenty of catering/barbecue rental outfits, but they don’t seem to offer these items. Where could I find them for rent? What search keywords am I not thinking of?
(I’d rather not buy the equipment, since I wouldn’t use it very often and it would basically be clutter.)
Check out some of the “open to the public” type restaurant supply stores. You might have some luck with that.
And depending on what you need to do, I know that some of them (at least around me) have a test kitchen that you can rent out for something like $40 an hour, so you could just use it there with their equipment.
If that doesn’t work I’d probably look into some of the party places that provide those giant tents, if they don’t have them there’s a good chance they’ll be able to point you in the right direction.
My last resort would be to call some of your local restaurants that might have them and ask if there’s anyway you could borrow one. I’d expect them to say no, but it’s worth a shot.
Does it need to be one pot? For about the same price as that one enormous pot, you could buy three 30-quart turkey fryers, complete with basket and burner.
What about a True Value? They have a section called JustAskRental. I know the guys that runs the True Value by me has said he’ll go out and get virtually anything you’d want to rent. (I don’t know the mechanics of that though. I don’t know if that means he’ll have it transferred from another True Value or if it means he’ll go out and buy it or what, but he’s got a lot of odd stuff in the store).
I’m not quite sure what sort of establishment you mean here.
Ah, interesting… I’ll follow up on this one. There’s a True Value just up the road.
If I were to buy it, then I’d just buy the one big pot. Money isn’t the concern; clutter is. I just don’t want to own the thing. If I rent, then multiple smaller pots would be okay, but not preferred.
(My purpose, by the way: I’d like to hold a crawfish boil for 8-12 people. [I’m from crawfish country originally.] The pot+burner is really the only thing I don’t have a good source for, short of buying it. The bigger the pot, the better, since it means fewer batches.)
Those were my first tries, and while I was impressed by the sorts of things I could rent, party and catering rental places don’t seem to regularly offer my particular quarry.
It’s the place where restaurants go to buy all their pots and pans and equipment etc… (I know, stupid answer).
Look up “Restaurant Supply” in your yellow pages and start calling around and asking if they are “open to the public”. A lot of those types of places will only let you shop there if you have a restaurant/store/business of some sort.
I would chech with your local seafood supplier. Where I live, Tennessee, the local fresh seafood shop will lend you the pot and burner when you buy the ingredients for your low country boil/crawfish boil. I just give them a deposit which is returned when I return the equipment clean.
Look up “Restaurant Supply” in your yellow pages and start calling around and asking if they are “open to the public”. A lot of those types of places will only let you shop there if you have a restaurant/store/business of some sort.
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Some will tolerate the public during slow times of the day, but more and more, if you don’t have a business license and tax number, they won’t let you in.
Talk to a catering company, a large one, if you can find one. They may have one, or they may rent one from another caterer. They should be able to point you in the right direction.
Keep in mind that the rental could end up costing you almost 2/3 of the purchase price. If you might use it twice, consider buying it.