Well actually I do, but I think I’m a special case: I’m on a ketogenic diet and I go through a helluva lot of cream making low-carb shakes with cream, almond milk and whey protein powder. But Walmart wouldn’t carry it in half-gallons if the demand wasn’t there, so there must be others. Huge families? People who make lots of homemade desserts? I might have thought heavy coffee drinkers but most people I know who drink coffee prefer powdered creamer or maybe half-n-half.
People making their own butter?
That’s the only times I’ve ever bought half gallons of heavy whipping cream, but that’s gotta be a niche usage.
Especially since butter has a longer shelf life than cream, so a pound of butter is typically cheaper than enough cream to make a pound of butter.
Cream has a long shelf life also. We get a pint of heavy cream a week usually, no milk. And if I’m making chowder or something else using a lot of cream we’ll get a quart that week. And if we didn’t have a side by side refrigerator without enough space for that kind of thing we might get a half gallon every 2-3 weeks.
She does…
Huh; I wish I could buy half gallons. I have a milk frother that works very well with heavy cream and often use it with coffee. A quart lasts about two weeks, but the shelf life is so long that I expect it would be fine for a month.
Buy several smaller containers and the unopened ones will barely change quality over a month. I don’t know why but around here we don’t see economy of scale with the heavy cream. Cup, pint, and quart containers seem to be randomly priced. Multiple 1 cup containers often cost less than a pint or quart. Maybe that’s just a local thing. I think I have seen half gallons of heavy cream around Indigenous People’s Day and Xmas but usually they aren’t on the shelves. Anyway, keep it just around the freezing point with minimal exposure to the air and it lasts a very long time.
Yeah, I should probably do that. I keep my fridge at maybe 34 F, and the cream is UHT pasteurized. Unopened, it would likely last several months.
Asparagus was on sale, so I made an awfully big pot of cream of asparagus soup. I bought a quart of cream and had some leftover.
We’ve bought it by the half-gallon a time or two when we were making a bunch of ice cream. But again, not too common to make a lot like that at once- these were special occasions.
Yeah, the economics of making your own butter aren’t too favorable. The times I’ve done it was to make cultured butter, in which case it does come out clearly cheaper, as most cultured butters end up being about $8-$10/lb. Now that I think of it, though, it’s not half gallons of whipping cream I was buying but rather quarts, which make about a pound of butter (a little less in my experience). So about half price of cultured butter. I’m not sure I’ve seen these half gallon containers now.
Pints and quarts are what I’ve seen, and the quarts seem like an awful lot.
ETA: what I meant was stores can keep butter longer than cream, so they can charge less for butter because it’s less of a spoilage loss risk.
How much for one of those? (That size doesn’t show up when I go check the local Walmart’s inventory on their website.)
I’ve seen it in gallon jugs around here. Why risk not having enough?
My first thought, like @bump, was for making ice cream. Otherwise, there are a couple of dishes I’ve made that made quart sizes worthwhile, such as sweet and/or savory cheesecakes, but generally most of -my- applications top out at a couple of cups. Unless, again, it’s around a holiday and I have the excuse of cooking to share.
But yeah, I agree, the higher fat content creams last a lot longer than the half & half I normally keep as creamer, so using it up if I have the occasion to buy a lot isn’t normally a problem. Although I get mine at costco normally.
Just to note, regular whipping cream has a slightly lower fat content than heavy cream or heavy whipping cream. It will tend to have a slightly shorter shelf life as well. Probably no more than a couple of days though.
I have also seen the opinion that mixing sugar into cream for making whipped cream will extend the shelf life of the cream. So even if you’re making just a little whipped cream a day you could sugar all of the cream up right off the bat and make it a little longer lasting. I’m thinking the sugar mixes with the water in the cream slightly reducing it’s volume and increasing the relative butterfat content by volume. Or overthinking it maybe because maybe it only seems to last longer because the sugar keeps it tasting better.
They used to be $6.00, now they’re like $7.25 due to recent inflation.