Spice Organization 101
Whether you’re looking to spice up your cooking routine or want to elevate your kitchen organization, your spice collection is a great place to start. Spices are small but mighty: they’re equal parts essential and unique, and can make all the difference in any dish. It’s not uncommon to feel overwhelmed by your spice collection, no matter how big or small. With different shaped and sized bottles, multiples of the same spice, it can feel like a challenge to keep them corralled and easy to access while you cook. To avoid digging aimlessly through your pantry, cabinets, and drawers to find the one spice you need, try getting your spices organized once and for all.
Creating simple organizational systems for your spices can help to keep everything in one place, making it easy to find any spice at a moment’s notice. Having a specific zone for spices in your kitchen or pantry will ensure that your spices stay organized, with each one having a designated home, while looking and tasting fresh. Here are our best techniques for spice organization:
No matter the end result you’re aiming for, the first step to organizing your spices is taking everything out of your cabinet, or desired spice storage area, and cleaning the area.
Once you have your spices out on the counter, check their expirations (yes, spices do go bad) If they’ve expired, toss them. If they don’t have an expiration printed on the bottle, our rule of thumb is to discard any more than 4 years old, as spices lose their potency after 3-4 years. Group like spices together, and as you sort, feel free to get rid of any spices you know you never use or you don’t like. You can donate these spices to a friend, family member, or cooking school to ensure that they get used.
Now that you’ve gone through your inventory, it’s time to determine the best method of storage. This will depend largely on the space you’re in and how big your pared down collection is. Laying flat in a drawer, on risers in a pantry, stacked on the counter? Decide what will work best for you and how you operate in the kitchen.
How to Organize Spices in a Cabinet
If you opt for storing spices in a cabinet, placing most-used spices on a lower shelf at eye level will create easy access and simplicity in your cooking. Using risers here will help to maximize your space, and increase visibility and accessibility for your seasonings. On higher shelves, if you have a larger spice collection, using lazy susans will help with speedy accessibility as well. Lazy susans are also helpful for storing spices that come in larger containers, and may not fit on a riser, if you do not decant your spices.
Cabinet Storage Options
How to Organize Spices in a Drawer
If you have a drawer large enough for your spice collection, storing them in a drawer near your stove may be your preferred organization method. Here, we typically opt to use a flatlay spice liner or an in-drawer spice rack to keep spices in place. Storing spices in a drawer can be a bit more technical, because taking drawer measurements into account is key. However, this method of storage is worthwhile since all of your spices are stored visibly, and are right at your fingertips. Having your spices all laid out in your kitchen drawer can effortlessly elevate your seasoning storage, and create a beautiful array of your most-loved flavors!
Drawer Storage Options
How to Organize Spices in your Pantry
If your cabinet and drawer space is limited, you can store your spices in the pantry. If you opt to store spices in your pantry, keeping them at eye level is recommended, so that spices can be located as easily as possible. Here, using risers is an ideal way to store spices. If you’re decanting your spices (more on that in a minute!), you can create a designated bin towards the top of your pantry to hold your backstock supply. When you need to replenish your spice jars, simply reach for the backstock bin!
Pantry Storage Options
How to Organize Spices on your Wall
Another way to store spices is on shelves mounted to your kitchen wall. Here, you can use any type of shelving that you prefer, whether it be wire shelving, acrylic floating shelves, wooden shelves, or metal shelves. You can customize wall seasoning storage to fit your style and taste.
Wall-Mounted Storage Options
Decanting Your Spices
While an optional step, we often recommend decanting your spices. This is an entirely personal preference based on lifestyle and your needs. Decanting spices is great for maximizing any storage space, because having uniform containers makes it easy for them to seamlessly fit together, especially in drawers or on the wall. In addition to making the organization easy and nice looking , spices are best preserved in airtight containers in areas that are not exposed to light, in cool, dark places. If all of your spice doesn’t fit in the jar you are decanting into, not to worry! Create a backstock bin in your pantry to hold extra spices from your supply. This way, you can simply reach for the backstock bin when refilling your spice jars!
Spice Jars
Labeling Your Spices
If you’ve decanted your spices, you’ll also want to label them with the spice name and expiration. Without labeling, you might forget what a spice is or more importantly, when it goes bad. Even if you think you can tell your spices apart, you wouldn’t want to mix up your onion powder with your ginger! To label spices, you can use stickers, or a traditional label maker.
Spice Labels
Organizing your spices is a simple way to elevate your kitchen organization and make your cooking routine more efficient. No matter how you choose to do it, adding in a system that is realistic for your needs and your lifestyle can completely transform the way you operate in the kitchen! Remember, your organizational needs might change over time as you continue to evolve, and that’s perfectly okay! You can refer back to these methods whenever you need a little spice in your life!