Practical Advice for Organizing your Pantry
Keeping your kitchen pantry tidy is a task which is as difficult as it is tedious. We often don’t have everything we need to organize our ingredients, nor the time to create any sense of order. So here is some practical advice on how to solve these problems.
Firstly, the most important thing is to save space and not any waste money. You have to be organized and practical if you don’t want to be constantly throwing away foods that have gone out of date.
Plus, keeping your pantry organized will mean that you always have the ingredients you need on hand when you need them and you can make the most of the space you have available. So, to help you do this, we’ll give you some practical advice on how you can keep your pantry clean and organized.
Keep your pantry nice and clean
As with every area of your home, keeping keep your pantry clean, and free of dust and dirt is essential. In this case we’re talking about somewhere you’ll be keeping food, so it’s particularly important to keep things spotlessly clean. Otherwise, it could actually be dangerous for your health.
If you spill food and don’t clean it up for days, small insects will be able to get into the open packets or jars. Then you’ll have to throw them away, and you’ll waste money.
Occasionally , take all the food out of your pantry and clean everything thoroughly with a damp cloth, using your favorite kitchen cleaning product. Then, rinse it out well with water. You don’t want to leave traces of toxic chemicals where you’ll be storing food. That can be dangerous too.
Organize your ingredients by food type
Organizing your pantry by food types will make it easier to find everything you need quickly. Cooking means having to do lots of different things at once. If you don’t have a lot of time and need to get things done quickly, having a well-organized pantry will be a huge help.
So how to do this? It’s really very simple: you can keep canned items on one side and rice, vegetables and pasta on the other.
Keep ingredients in tins and glass jars
You almost certainly have some old jam jars or other containers lying around. Remember to always keep and recycle jars. You can keep them for storing other foods and reuse them later.
You can use glass jars for storing ingredients like rice, pasta, flour and sugar. It’s a great and practical idea to label your jars. That way you can easily find your ingredients and you won’t get things mixed up.
In the same way, you can keep and label tins (ideally ones that have a lid) and use them for storing food. Plus, small glass jars are great for storing all different kinds of spices. That way you can get rid of those annoying packets which never close properly and end up spilling food all over your cupboards.
Add shelves to keep your pantry organized
If you don’t have enough space in your pantry, you might want to add some shelves. Otherwise, it’ll be very difficult to get your ingredients organized.
Some items can easily get forgotten at the back of a shelf. Then, when you want to use them, you find they’ve gone off and you have to get rid of them. So you’ve spent your money on them and you don’t even get to use them.
Remember: try to keep the things you’ve bought most recently at the back, and the rest at the front. That way, you’ll use the oldest ingredients first, and won’t ever need to throw food out.
Hang hooks underneath the shelves
If you’ve not got much space in your pantry and you need to keep your ingredients and crockery together, you might want to hang some hooks on the underside of some of the shelves. That way, you’ll save space and you can use them to hang mugs or other items.
Use storage boxes
Wooden boxes or wicker baskets are a really practical option for heavier items. For example, you could use them to store fruit, vegetables, tins, or bottles of water.
Plus, these are items you can’t keep on the cupboard shelves, because they might fall and break something. Try to keep them in their own boxes, on the ground or in one of the lower cupboards.
Write an inventory of what’s in your cupboards
Another way to keep track of your ingredients is to write an inventory of all the products you have when you re-organize your pantry and when you buy new ingredients. That way, you’ll know what you have and what you need.
You can pin this inventory on the pantry door. Then, you can cross out what you’ve run out of and note down what you need to buy next time.
Give our ideas a try and you’ll be able keep your pantry perfectly organized and sparkling clean. Try to be consistent with the cleaning, organizisation and use of space. And remember, if you can keep everything clean and tidy, it’ll be easier to get your housework done.