Frustrated with my spice cabinet

February 9, 2010 56 Comments

I am so frustrated with my spice cabinet. I can’t even begin to describe how much. I have encountered this a great deal several times in the last week. I have a small galley style kitchen. So while my love for spices is grand, my space for them well is quite frankly not so grand. I am trying to come up with a way to organize my spices and do so efficiently, so I can find them, and so that my spices don’t grow old and lose their flavor.

Before I go into why I find them frustrating on why I hate to store them, let me say I hate the variety that I have. I literally have a medium sized moving box of spices, excluding the wonderful salts that I have. I know this, because I moved twice in 2009. I packed everything up twice. I am beginning to wonder why I need so many spice blends. I am not talking about spice blends such as chili powder, or say curry powder. I think I have a problem with purchasing or acquiring odd ball spice blends like ‘Penzey’s Black and Red’, or the ‘Penzey’s Fox Point’ seasoning. I am beginning to wonder if I should just buy single herbs and spices, and not blend. This is going to be my plan of action, at least until I walk into a spice store and find something so spectacular I will want to have it in my home.

Storage, the physical storage, this is the part that causes me much heart ache. So something that works to my benefit is where I buy my spices. For the most part my spices come from two places. About 8 years back I started to purchase spices from Penzy’s, who has fabulous spiaces and they are often less expensive than what they are in a grocery store. In 2008 I found The Spice House in Chicago. I love The Spice House, again very good prices, and the freshest spices imaginable. So why this is important, is that they come in standard sizes. Everything comes in similar sizes, so I am not combining square containers, large plastic containers, and then goodness knows what else.

The organization of spices is where I really begin to fall apart. A couple of years ago I tried putting all of my spice jars into a drawer. For me, this wasn’t the most successful plan, as all of my jars are round. So everything rolled around in my drawer, and after opening the drawer a few times, I couldn’t read any of the labels. So now I have some tiered shelves in my spice cabinet that works ok. Since it is tiered I can read all of the labels, but I have too many spices, so I have to double stack everything. It is a pain. Last night when making some taco soup, I pulled out a lot of things before I got what I needed, and I was adding bits and pieces of blends trying to purge my cabinets of the spice blends.

My question to you is how do you organize your spices? What spices must you have? What can you live without? I am so frustrated by my having too many spices in too little of a space. Do you have any thoughts?
Write your suggestions below, I will be anxiously waiting to hear what in the world do you do with your spices.
Recommended Sites
My Spice Sage
Penzey’s
The Spice House

Gary

This works for us.
When we bought our current home about 18 years ago, we had a 2-tier lazy susan put in a lower corner cabinet where the door is attached to the lazy susan.
Upper shelf we have all of our small and medium spices in alphabetical order.
Problem – you can’t read the front labels on a lower shelf.
Solution – I made a list of all the spices and printed little round labels for each. Your local office supply store probably has a crazy variety of shapes. Add dates to these labels to help you purge extra older spices, that you really should not be saving for your grandkids. Then placed each label on the top of each jar.
I too am big into Penzy’s. We have one 3 miles from our home.
Lower shelf is used for large, Sam’s Club, type container, etc.
We recently purchased a refrigerator with French doors. One side has very shallow shelves by the ice maker. We use those for spices we want to keep refrigerated.
We use the small basket inside the freezer for additional longer term spice storage.
- http://www.copykat.com Stephanie
  
  Gary,
  You have some great ideas. I have since moved to a different set up. Mostly I benefited from a larger kitchen. I too, have written dates on my spices so I know how old they are. I am curious what spices do you store in the fridge/freezer?
JStansell

Don’t know if you will see this comment or not but I, like everyone else, had many spices of different shapes, sizes, etc. What has worked wonderfully for me is in my pantry i hung a spice wire rack from lowe’s and numbered the shelves. BUT the best thing I did was type a list of all spices in alphabetical order and I hung a small cork board right beside the spice rack and just stuck the list by the spices with a thumb tack. I can go in and, at a glance, see if I have the spice and exactly which shelve it is located. This also helps tremendously if I have “help” in placing spices back…..as anyone can see where it goes. If I run out of a spice i make a note and if I add or delete a spice, i just make the change on my computer and print a new list. This has been a life-saver for me.
Crissie

I put all my spices/salts in jars – mason or 4 oz jelly jars – my hubby glued sheet steel to the underside of all my cabinets and I purchased earth magnets and glued to the top of my lids. All my jars are stuck to the bottom of my upper cabinets – there are 78 of them… I used tiny magnets with a 1 1/2 pound pull for my jelly jars and larger ones with a 5# pull for my masons – I have cabinet lights behind them and although you can barely see the jellies, they reflect the light and look really good! They don’t take up any counter or cabinet space that way ; )
TucsonJenn

I HATE my tiny spice cabinet…omg, I want to strangle whoever “designed” it (I say designed with quotes because it was CLEARLY an after thought).
I’m thinking of getting something like this organizer for a drawer because drawers are actually something that I have extra of in my kitchen. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001IYK714/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B00124YFHM&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=10E3W5CEEBYKN9Z7XCZ7
If anyone has any experience with these, please let me know if they’re good or just another kitchen gadget that’ll go to next year’s yard sale… Thanks for posting this…I’m glad I’m not alone. lol
- http://www.copykat.com Stephanie
  
  I haven’t tried one of these. But anyone that designs a small spice cabinet is not my favorite person. I have always needed something just larger than what I have. I did buy some shelving solutions from the Container Store. There is a brand called Elfa and they make these nice back of the door systems that are great for helping you organize what’s in your pantry.