Well! It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Activity on the blog lately has been pretty solidly inversely proportional to what’s going on here… We’ve got a list of projects and are racing towards September, desperately trying to check everything off!
So today, instead of continuing to pretend I don’t have a blog, we’re talking about spices. Specifically, how to store spices.
If you’re like me, you have tons and tons of spices. One new recipe calls for a couple new spices, another new recipe calls for another… pretty soon you have 50 spice jars and nowhere to keep them all.
In desperation, you turn to Pinterest for ideas. And oooooooooh boy! The inspiration! All the pretty wrapping-paper-lined drawers and tiered shelves and matchy-matchy glass jars and magnetized lids andandand… And then you realize that none of those solutions would actually be practical in real life for anyone who has more than 20 spices, max. Or who actually, you know, lives life and doesn’t want to spend time buying spices and transferring them to fancy matching glass jars. Crazy!
A few rules I had for my own solution when detangling this conundrum:
- The spices need to be easily accessible while cooking/baking (meaning they’d need to be in a central place)
- My solution needs to be scalable – it couldn’t break when I add a new jar or 5
- The jars can’t be exposed to excess light or heat, meaning they couldn’t be over the stove
- No Lazy Susans – not enough pantry space
This actually narrowed things down quite a bit for me. I turned away from the periphery of the kitchen and towards the island, which is in the middle of the kitchen and thus satisfies the first criterion. The island cabinet doors are both quite large, which I figured would help me satisfy criterion #2, and if I kept the jars on the inside of the doors, they’d be protected from light/heat, satisfying criterion #3.
This was looking good. All I needed was a rack…
This 4-tier chrome beauty from Amazon fit the bill nicely.
And wouldn’t you know, it’s NOT a DIY! Sometimes you can just buy something that works!
I had to buy 2, one for each island door, so I can store spices for cooking and baking separately. Also they wouldn’t all fit on one rack…
These pictures were obviously taken awhile ago… pre-cabinet painting! Yowza!
One pleasant surprise – I love storing my baking soda and baking powder on their sides. It makes it way easier to scoop out teaspoons with my measuring spoons. Unexpected plus!
After living with this solution for ~9 months now, I can safely say this system works for me. New spices usually fit just fine, and the ones that don’t (if I’m buying a reserve to replace a spice that’s low, like the cayenne you can see in the bottom image on the bottom row) I’ll just put into my makeshift staging area. It’s worked like a charm. I love that it takes basically any shape/size spice jar!
How do you store your spices?
Did you have to reinforce the hinges to bear the additional weight?
Amazingly, no! I definitely lucked out, because it would have been a pain in the rear to add another hinge. We have Youngdale hinges, which require a precise cutout in the door for mounting.
Good call. Mine are stored in bins by type…herbs, peppers, sweet, etc but they’re so high that pretty much Im the only one who can reach them. And no one else ever gets my system. Especially my mom ????