Spices and condiments are an essential part of a delicious meal. Many people store these spices in a dedicated drawer known as a spice drawer. However, due to the vast amount of spices in most homes, organizing the spice drawer may be a nightmare.
Most of these spices come with various containers in various shapes and sizes, making it hard to organize.
Knowing this, we will be looking into a few smart ways to organize your seasons and spice drawer.
Take Stock of Your Spices
The first thing you need to do if you want to organize your spice drawer is to determine the spices you have and the available space. The available space will determine how much spices you can keep.
Move Spices to Similar Containers
Now that you know all the spices you can keep, and what you own, you can begin the next phase. Earlier on, we learned that spice packaging could come in various shapes and sizes, making them complex to organize.
To solve this problem, take the spices out of their original containers and place them in jars of the same shape.
When moving spices, the following are a few things to consider:
- Ease in Access: Select jars that you can easily get if anyone breaks.
- Airtight: Choose jars that come with airtight seals to make certain spices remain fresh.
- Protection against Light: if you place spices in a location where sunlight tends to reach, choose dark containers. This will ensure light does not get into the spices and degrade them with time. If you are placing your spices in a cabinet or drawer, then it is fine to use clear jars.
As you move spices to their new location, ensure you label them. You can do this using any system you want, however, make certain the labels face the appropriate direction on the container to spot them at a glance while you cook.
In some cases, you may have more than enough spices than you can get in the jar. To avert this, get an overflow basket to store the extra. When you need to buy more spices, check the overflow basket to make sure you are out of spices before you purchase more.
Get your Spice Drawer Ready
The next step is to get your drawer ready. Instead of placing all of your spices in the drawer and letting them roll around, it is best to organize things using a drawer insert.
Arrange Spices
There are many ways to categorize your spices. You can do this by flavor, or just place the ones you use the most in front. The following are also other things to consider:
- When categorizing your spices, don’t place it in storage and forget about it. Do not layer your spice jars, or you may lose track of those behind and buy more even when you don’t need them. If you must, use two drawers to store your spices, so you don’t have this problem.
- You can also sort your spices by alphabets. This is the method I recommend as you will know where things are always. Also, all your spices have a designated area, unlike the other options.
- Another way to arrange your spices is by taking advantage of the space underneath your cabinets. To do this, include some hooks to the side of your cabinets or the wall underneath. Then using a wire, hang your spice jars from these hooks.
Stick to the Strategy
Keeping your drawer organized goes beyond doing it for the first day and forgetting about it. To ensure it works, you need to constantly stick with the organization strategy you choose to go with. The steps below can help you keep your spice drawer organized after the initial phase:
- Be merciless about the things you keep
- Be merciless about the things you discard
This means you don’t purchase spices that you may need or one that you use once. Instead, go with those that you will need and can function for numerous purposes. Also, ruthlessly get rid of old spices, and you have ignored it for a long time. Go through your stock frequently so you can determine what you have.
Wrap up
Organizing the spice draw is not a task everyone can handle. However, it is not difficult either. If you know what to do, you can keep your spice drawer organized and make cooking a breeze. All the tips we have discussed above can help you achieve this. What is left is for you to read and implement them to see the transformation in your spice drawer.