Need An Entire Bucket Of Soy Sauce? Head To Your Nearest Costco Business Center

If you are lucky enough to live near one of the 28 Costco Business Centers in the U.S. and happen to need a five-gallon bucket of soy sauce, you're in luck. While most standard Costco Warehouses have half-gallon (64-ounce) options in conveniently handled jugs, Costco Business Centers offers five gallons of Kikkoman in big, five-gallon buckets.

Business Centers are Costco's answer to the Restaurant Depot. They're meant to supply food service businesses like restaurants, convenience stores, and the like, but anyone with any level of Costco membership can shop there. They don't have pharmacies or food courts, but they do feature products like 50-pound bags of high-gluten flour or lard, restaurant kitchen equipment, a case of whole goats and lambs, and five-gallon buckets of soy sauce.

One five-gallon bucket will set you back $33.79 (prices may vary by location). If five gallons is just a touch too much for you but two half-gallon jugs from a normal Costco isn't going to cut it, the business center also sells one-gallon jugs.

A 20-ounce, supermarket-size bottle of Kikkoman will cost you $5.49 at a Kroger. That's $0.22 per ounce more expensive, and it would cost you $175.68 to buy five gallons of soy sauce from a grocery store. There's no doubt that as a pure measure of dollars and cents, it's a great value. Definitely worth the buy if you need a lot of soy sauce. But one question remains that no Costco member is a stranger to: Do you really need five gallons of soy sauce?

Soy sauce will degrade over time once it's been opened. As it oxidizes, the flavor will change. Kikkoman recommends refrigerating its soy sauce once opened, though uncontaminated soy sauce will not go bad in or outside of the fridge. Do you have room for five gallons of soy sauce in your fridge? Or in a cabinet, for that matter, where it won't be affected by the temperature swings of your hot stove and oven.

How much soy sauce do you use? Even though it won't go bad in a food safety way, it won't last forever. If there's room in the fridge, the soy sauce will last for about two years. If you go through one and a third supermarket-sized bottle per month, you'll finish this bucket in time. If stored at room temperature, though, it will only last for about six months.

"Over 300 years of excellence" is meant to be the Kikkoman tagline, not the amount of time it should take you to finish the bucket. Although it's worth remembering that the Costco Business Center is really meant for small businesses, it's not impossible for an everyday home cook to use up a giant amount of soy sauce. This is especially true if you're one to cook for a crowd: Gamedays, block parties, cookouts, and reunions are all great excuses for a big bucket of soy sauce. If you're marinating for a group of hungry people frequently, it really doesn't take that long to get through all that Kikkoman.

Salad dressings, glazes, marinades, and homemade takeout staples are just a few of the many ways to use soy sauce at home. Filipino chicken adobo will use about ⅔ of a cup at a time for six servings, while take-out style beef and broccoli will use ½ cup for four servings. Adding a little soy sauce here and there to deepen the umami flavor of gravy, beef stew, or even tomato sauce can make a little, everyday dent in the remainder of the bucket. Or, with a serving size of 15 mL, you'd easily have enough for 630 sushi nights for two.