One of the first places to begin your kitchen adventure and love affair with food and ingredients is your humble spice rack. It can rapidly become your most loyal supporter in the kitchen.
A spice rack serves as a kaleidoscopic palette of flavoursome dried herbs and spices that will impart specific flavours to your cooking. These spices can be paired or used on their own to complement your culinary creations.
To set up a do-it-yourself spice rack or spice drawer, it all comes down to the space you have in your kitchen and what will be most practical for you. Many homeware stores sell rectangular storage baskets that can slide in and out of your pantry or cupboards and be filled with spices.
You could also recycle a wooden box as a home for your spice collection. You could keep the spices in their original packaging, and if they’re in packets invest in some kitchen storage bag clips to reseal them after opening. This will stop any spills that make your cupboards smell like a curry house!
If you have plenty of shelf space or a large walk-in pantry, you could dedicate a shelf to spices, using small screw-top preserving jars or little spring-clip jars for storage. This is an ideal way to store spices, as it saves you fiddling through a spice box or drawer, which can become disorganised very easily. Because my kitchen is the hub of my home and I spend a lot of time creating recipes, I have all my spices in alphabetical order for ease of use, but you don’t have to go that far!
A handy thing to do is buy a jar for every spice you use, and use a labeller or a permanent marker to clearly indicate which spice is which. Many spices are a similar colour, so good labelling will save you a lot of time trying to find what you need.
Having your spices in glass jars will allow you to see which ones you need to top up before they actually run out. Depending on the way you like your kitchen to look, stacked rows of jars along a shelf can be both stylish and practical.
