Question
Dawn O’Rourke
What is the recommended way to store spices short and long term?
Answer
So, this is a picture frame from the dollar store. These happen to be my beloved grandparents, and that's me as a first grader. You may have heard me, excuse me, say that they were chefs. So, I went to The Container Store because I had too many spices, and they were everywhere, and it was unorganized, and it was driving me crazy. So, I need you to put on your imaginary glasses right now. And if you pretend that this is your kitchen drawer, this is how I store my spices. And I always store my spices in alphabetical order because it helps to keep me organized. But what this actually is, let me take these spices out. I try to buy organic when I can. When I can't, that's the way life is. Trader Joe has some very good... Well, here it is. Here are these frames. And they're sitting on an angle, and then you just store, store, store. And then I keep them in a kitchen drawer. And it's dark. It's free from any kind of light that would be harmful to the spices as you might expose them on a kitchen rack or something like that. So, that's where I keep all of my spices. And I can, in my kitchen, store 32 bottles of spices this way. And it's organized. I do take a Sharpie marker and date the bottom of them. You should only keep spices for excuse me, about a year, and that would be a very helpful thing. And also, Dawn, to sort of reinforce what we just discussed here, I did post a wonderful response to the same question from Chef Dan from one of his former events, and you can click on that and get some more insights from Chef Dan. So, I think that will be helpful. I do want to say one thing. We remodeled our kitchen about, oh, I don't know, two or three years ago. And someone had sent me some beautiful spices in a tin, and they were so lovely. And I think I put them along the top edge of the stove because they were lovely. And then I realized that the extreme heat of my stove and my oven was going to dry the spices out, take away some of their flavor. And when I opened one of them to use, you couldn't use it because it was a solid brick. So, I learned my lesson that way. And the other reason why I like storing them in the drawer this way is that it keeps me from overbuying spices, which is an easy thing to do when you go to any grocery store. Let me see what's on the spice aisle. So, there we go.
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