Ready, set, organize

May 17, 2020 by
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Since I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home, my commute has gone from 50 miles to less than 50 feet. I always said that if I did not have to drive so far for work I would have oodles of time to accomplish a laundry list of tasks around the house. It turns out that this is only partly true. Motivation to begin these tasks is elusive, but I have capitalized on my extra time by checking off a few of the items on my list, and one of those was to organize my pantry and cupboards. My pantry is actually a small closet in a bedroom that is next to the kitchen. I built a couple of shelves and have organized the chaos as well as I can without spending a lot of money on containers and slide-out drawers.

Spices in jars

In my kitchen, I reorganized all of the cabinets save one. I really went to town on this task, moving things around wholesale. My husband laments that he will never be able to find anything now, to which I replied “now?” I can never send him to the pantry to find a can of tomatoes or a box of pasta, because we are always “out” until I go in and the box or can magically appears. But I digress. Included in the reorganization is a newly organized spice drawer, pictured above. I took inspiration from the folks at America’s Test Kitchen, who provide several tips on how to organize your spices.

As you can see, I went the alphabetical route, but ATK has an interesting concept that might be even better. They suggest using five different categories:

  • Warm Spices = Yellow
  • Peppers = Red
  • Dried Herbs = Green
  • Whole Seeds = Blue
  • Miscellaneous = Orange

ATK says this works especially well when you are going to put spices in rows in a cabinet, and they add color-coded dots to the jars so they can easily spot them. They also suggest going through and checking spices for freshness. I ended up purging a few herbs that I use infrequently because they were rather lackluster.

My big splurge was for glass spice jars from Penzey’s Spices that fit nicely into the drawer I am using. At first, I tried placing the jars on their sides so I could easily see the contents, but it was too difficult to pull the jars out that way, so I broke out the freezer tape and a permanent marker. It takes a bit longer to locate the spice with no visual clues, but the ease of removing and replacing the jars makes up for it. I like having consistently-sized jars rather than leaving the spices in their original containers, and it works especially well for spices purchased in bulk. What are your favorite organizing tricks?

Category: Antipasto

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6 Comments

  • Jane  on  May 17, 2020

    I have Elfa spice racks on the back of my pantry door and the jars are all filed alphabetically. I do have a few bags and odd shaped jars out of order on deeper shelves at the bottom so I do like the idea of buying jars and decanting everything so they look consistent. And doing a purge in the process.

  • hnordhed  on  May 17, 2020

    It’s not perfect, but I divide them into baking or cooking spices so I know where to start looking. There is one turntable for cooking/grilling spices, and one for baking spices. The third turntable holds the very large bottles like cinnamon, or tins like sea salt or Hungarian paprika. I have them alphabetized as much as I can.

    Also, if you have a McCormick tin for anything but pepper it’s at least 25 years old! Here’s here tips for identifying which ones should be tossed.
    https://www.mccormick.com/toss

  • Indio32  on  May 17, 2020

    Sorting out the spices has been on my to-do list…… forever.

    Firstly can’t decide if I want to use a small tin like the yellow ones sold from The Spice Shop in Notting Hill spookily opposite Books For Cooks (do spices need to be protected from light??) or little glass jars.

    Then there’s the issue of quality. Just about every small glass jar I’ve seen has been the cheap ‘made in China’ sort with a seam and to add insult to injury not particularly cheap either. Tried La Parfait but the metal lids seem to rust at the slightest provocation.

    Maybe its time to throw some weight into sorting this out!

  • averythingcooks  on  May 17, 2020

    Paragraph 2 made me laugh out loud ……..I then read it to T who basically responded with “at least I’m not the only one who can’t find ANYTHING in your secret, mystery maze password required pantry / kitchen magic cave 🙂
    That seemed pretty descriptive to me 🙂

  • lkgrover  on  May 17, 2020

    I reorganized back in November. They are now in order: salts, peppers, herbs, spices, seeds (ground & whole), and blends. They are alphabetical within each category. I bought a spice rack from the Container Store, which is in an area of the kitchen does not get sun, and is not near the oven.

    Reorganizing the rest of the pantry is on my to-do list.

  • stepspior  on  May 18, 2020

    I have one box that holds all my peppers. A box for salts, sea , kosher, garlic salt and herbed sea salt Spices A-H and I- Z.
    Baking from Vanilla , Cinnamon ,Nutmeg Extracts and Leveners on one shelf

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