How to Stock & Organize a Kitchen Pantry

A kitchen pantry can serve as the heart of a hobby farm kitchen with a dash of thoughtful planning. More than just cabinets stuffed with random dry goods, a well-thought-out pantry can save two of your most precious resources: time and money.

Think of the kitchen pantry as your farm’s on-site convenience store, efficiently stocked with the basics to keep your daily meals and food duties humming along, from ample sugar for putting up strawberry jam to ingredients for a quick dessert for the neighbors’ impromptu visits.

A well-stocked and organized pantry also helps trim your grocery budget, not to mention the time and fuel costs of unplanned trips. By always having basic staples on hand, you can readily make homemade—and healthier—versions of pricey, processed foods like hot cocoa or even sweetened condensed milk.

Despite all these glories, the kitchen pantry sometimes gets relegated to a low rank among kitchen priorities, often randomly stuffed with food until you can barely close the cabinet doors and don’t know what you have anymore.

Here are some easy tips to quickly and strategically organize and elevate your kitchen pantry to the master hub of your home.

Identify Your Kitchen Pantry’s Purpose

Name the key items you make all the time and structure your pantry around these core ingredients.

Pantry purposes may change seasonally, particularly during the summer peak when you’re constantly processing the abundant garden harvest.

For example, if you’re freezing loads of spinach and Swiss chard, this adds up to a need for a lot of olive oil for the blanching process.

Buy in Bulk

Bulk items typically are pantry staples that can be purchased in larger-volume bags. Buying core items in bulk helps both your pocketbook and the planet. Not only do you save money over individual units, you use a lot less packaging and contribute less to the landfill. By purchasing bulk organic ingredients, the price is reduced significantly.

Bulk-buying store chains provide plentiful locations and easy access with a membership fee.

Local buying clubs and food co-ops tap into the buying power of a group pooling their resources to purchase bulk foods at close to wholesale prices.

A buying club usually starts at about five or six people to meet minimum order requirements and works through a local natural foods distributor to place a group order. (Look for a listing of food cooperatives near you.)

Another option is to ask your local grocery store to special order a bulk item or case for you, on which they may also be willing to give you a discount.

Use Up Your Kitchen Pantry Contents

Sometimes along with squirreling instincts to pack away food, we need gentle reminders to use up what we stockpile.

This sounds like an obvious concept, but we’ve all accidentally bought something in duplicate or were forced to throw out expired food.

Despite today’s rising food costs, the average American still unfortunately throws out approximately 15 percent of food purchased annually. This adds up to over $500 in wasted food.

A suggestion is to make a family “game” to “eat through” the pantry each winter. After the December holidays, try to go cold turkey on buying food, focusing on eating the preserved garden bounty in combination with everything in the pantry.

On a personal note, one winter my family realized we had accumulated a big, plastic bag filled with red-and-white peppermint candies acquired from restaurants and leftover holiday candy canes, which resulted in one of our now-favorite cookie recipes: peppermint biscotti.

Always keep in mind how much you actually use of something and buy accordingly. If a bulk bag is a great deal, but you know you won’t use 50 pounds of rice in a year, consider splitting it with a friend.

Dried herb and spice purchases may be one place where bulk buying is not helpful since they lose their flavor over time. It may be better to buy only what you can use in one year and replace it with fresh stock.

Invest in Proper Kitchen Pantry Storage

The challenge of purchasing in bulk is having a place to conveniently store the item once it comes out of the bulk bag.

Going back to identifying your pantry’s purpose, invest in accessible, quality storage containers for the bulk items you use most often. Look for containers made from high-grade, durable materials with tight-fitting lids.

While some of these containers may seem pricey, investing in something that makes your kitchen routines easier will quickly prove its worth.

Recycled glass containers work well as easy, frugal storage containers. Wide-mouth canning jars make it easy to access the ingredients and enable you to quickly identify what’s inside.

Glass and metal containers deter mice as they’re impossible to chew through.

Pack in the Nutrients

Think nutrition when stocking your kitchen pantry: How can you get the biggest healthy bang for your buck—and allocated space? Dried beans, for example, deliver high protein, vitamins and minerals at a significant cost savings from canned or processed bean foods.

“Dried fruits rank high as an economical and convenient source of flavor, nutrients and fiber, especially if you grow or buy fresh fruit in season and dehydrate it at home,” recommends Angie Tagtow, an environmental nutritionist based in Iowa and a leading advocate championing public access to fresh, affordable, sustainably raised food.

“Drying your own fruit in season eliminates the added sweeteners and preservatives often added to commercially dried fruit, so all you taste is the pure food flavor.”

Dried fruits such as blueberries and cranberries also offer lots of antioxidants and can be used as a snack, added to baked items or sprinkled on top of yogurt or oatmeal.

MacGyver Your Kitchen Pantry

Remember MacGyver, the lead character from the 1980s television show of the same name, who could make just about anything from whatever parts he had on hand? Apply the same principle to your kitchen pantry (minus MacGyver’s ever-present duct tape) and think outside the box when a recipe calls for a specific ingredient that you don’t have.

This substitution approach works particularly well for ingredients you wouldn’t commonly have on hand, like fresh buttermilk.

Easy Pantry Substitutions

• 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate = 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa plus 1 tablespoon butter or vegetable oil
• 1 cup cake flour = 1 cup all-purpose flour, remove 2 tablespoons of the flour and add 2 tablespoons of cornstarch
• 1 cup buttermilk = A wee bit less than 1 cup fresh milk with 1 tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice. Let sit for 5 minutes (will curdle).

Stuck in the middle of a recipe when you realize you don’t have a can of sweetened condensed milk? Here’s an easy substitute for sweetened condensed milk that’s much less processed than the commercial variety. This can be used in recipes that call for one can of sweetened condensed milk:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup dry milk powder
• 1/3 cup hot water
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 3 T. butter (melted)

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a blender, layering wet and dry ingredients. Blend until smooth.

Add a Dash of Exotic Flavor

For minimal space and cost, you can sprinkle some seasonings into your meals that bring a range of global flavors to your homestead.

• • Tamarind paste: Tart spice used in Latin American and Asian dishes such as Pad Thai.
  • Sesame oil: Vegetable oil derived from sesame seeds and used in Indian and Asian cooking.
  • Hoisin sauce: Chinese dipping sauce made with garlic, vinegar and chili peppers—an interesting alternative to soy sauce.
  • Fish sauce: Southeast Asian condiment used to flavor various dishes.

Keep Your Kitchen Pantry Organized

The key to kitchen pantry management is restocking before you run out of something.

A sticky note inside a kitchen cabinet can be a handy place to jot shopping list items.

Organization also applies to how you keep your items stored on the shelves. Grouping like items together aids in quickly finding things, such as canned goods, baking supplies, spices and rice.

Think of your kitchen pantry as the garden’s dance partner, working together with your harvest bounty to bring flavorful, healthy meals to your family’s table.

This article about how to stock and organize a kitchen pantry was written for Hobby Farms magazine. Click here to subscribe.