With these professional tips, you can keep your favorite flavorings fresh and quickly discover them.
Individual spice jars take up little room in your kitchen. However, if you have an extensive collection of dried herbs, spices, blends, and seasonings, having them accessible and organized is essential for easing meal prep and keeping your pantry tidy. It also prevents you from purchasing an extra jar of a spice you already had but couldn’t find.
Whether you have space for a dedicated spice cabinet and are a chef eager to fill it, or you prefer to maintain a streamlined selection on a decorative wall rack, these expert ideas for storing, organizing, and labeling your spices will assist.
Select an Easy-To-Reach Location
Consider your kitchen layout before purchasing a spice storage system. It is always preferable to keep items close to where they are used. Spices should be kept near your stove or on the countertop where you do most of your food preparation. Remember that herbs remain longer if kept away from heat, light, and moisture.
You’ll know what kind of organizing system you’re looking for once you’ve found a convenient location. Personal preference and the arrangement of your kitchen will influence whether you store your spices in a drawer, a cabinet, or on a countertop or wall rack.
Could you place them in a shallow drawer?
A shallow kitchen drawer, such as where you keep your utensils, is the ideal depth for tiered racks that allow you to store your spices at an angle. Drawers enabling you to store your spices are excellent since they keep everything visible and accessible.
These racks are available in many materials, ranging from low-cost, expanding plastic to pre-sized solid wood or made-to-order widths. For a more customized look, you can buy these inserts in one piece and have it cut to the size of your drawer. If your drawer is too narrow for an additional riser, use textured drawer liners to secure the jars and keep them from rolling.
Install a Pull-Out Spice Cabinet
Consider installing a small pull-out shelf between two base cabinets when building a new kitchen layout. Some pull-out cabinets are built to accommodate spice jars; in this instance, arrange the jars directly on the pull-out. Spices can lay flat in more expansive pull-out cabinets with access to shallow drawers.
Keep them upright in a large drawer.
If a more profound drawer is your best spice storage option, consider storing spices in a basket or bucket. Bins in deep drawers keep spices neat and straight. When necessary, label the tops of spice jars.
Maintain an Upper Cabinet Shelf
Upper cabinets, particularly those near your kitchen, are ideal for storing spices. Use a tiered riser or turntable to take advantage of the depth of an upper cabinet, or store spices in a bin that can be pulled out for complete access.
Utilize a Corner Cabinet
Corner cabinets, particularly those lacking built-in turntables, are relatively easy to organize. Still, they can be a good option for spice storage. Put a small spice collection on a turntable and place it on the lowest shelf of an upper cabinet or the upper level of a lower cabinet to use those odd corner cabinets.
Showcase Your Collection
If your kitchen doesn’t have enough cabinet or drawer space to store your spices, utilize a wall or counter rack to make them a decorative element. If cupboard space is limited, consider a thin spice rack, narrow floating shelving, or even a magnetic board with spices housed in magnetic jars for an open wall.
Create a Consistent Appearance
If you do decide to exhibit your spices, investing in matching jars and labels will keep your collection looking polished. Uniform canisters or jars will help reduce visual clutter and tidy the environment. If you regularly buy the same brand of spices, the bottles will be the same size, shape, and design; if your source varies, decant the spices into matching jars.
Add Labels After decanting your spices, use matching labels to complete the design. Handwriting on such a small label might be challenging. As a result, we recommend a printed label that everyone in your home can read. Keep the label location consistent if you prefer to design your label or write out the name of each spice. Whatever method you use to label your spices, keep the labels consistent and in the same spot on each jar. This will make scanning your collection more manageable.
Monitor Expirations
As you decant spices into uniform canisters, place a label on the bottom to record the expiration date on the original container or note when you bought and opened that specific spice. This will tell you if they are fresh or have been sitting too long.
To keep your spices organized, look through them once a year and discard anything that has passed its best-by date. This is an excellent time to do it in November, so your holiday food will be delicious.
Establish a Sense of Order
After you’ve filled and labeled your spice jars, determine how you want to arrange them on your racks and risers. Personal preference governs the specific technique.
This is the most obvious way to organize… well, anything—but it also means you might take chili powder instead of cinnamon.
By Classification: Sort spices according to their intended use: Keep baking spices on one riser, blends on another, and the remainder organized by cuisine on the third.
By Preference: Keep your most-used spices close at hand and others organized into bins by category so you can quickly access all your weeknight cooking basics while also pulling out a container for weekend baking.
Separate Salt and Pepper From Other Spices Make a separate room for salt and pepper types, which come in more significant canisters and don’t fit neatly in smaller spice jars. This allows for additional storage of common cooking spices. Salt and pepper are exceptions to the rule that organizers want to keep countertops uncluttered. A single pair on a turntable near your stove works nicely if you cook regularly and are always reaching for the salt and pepper.
If you like to decant salt and pepper into more attractive, counter-worthy containers, label these as well—a lesson learned the hard way. I didn’t believe I needed to name my marble salt cellar until I prepared a cup of tea and substituted salt for sugar.