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A small kitchen pantry can become cluttered easily, but you can take several steps to keep yours under control. Some ideas to make meal prep less of a hassle include:
- Make sure items are easy to see
- Use accessories like lazy Susans and spice racks
- Empty packages into stackable containers
Even for someone who enjoys working in the kitchen, cluttered and cramped conditions make the work less fun. If you’ve decided that you just have to resign yourself to it because your kitchen pantry is small, think again. There are things you can do to maximize your space and reduce the clutter, making your pantry more manageable.
Make Sure Pantry Items Are Easy to See
When you’re working with a small space that has to hold a variety of different items, you’ll need to make sure the ingredients are easy to see and identify. You can use clear bins or wire or mesh baskets to store groups of items that belong together in one space.
So, for example, you might put all of the cans of tuna in one bin because they’re the same thing, or store white sugar, brown sugar, honey, and Splenda in one basket because they’re all sweeteners and belong together. Then, when you look into the pantry, you’ll be able to easily identify the tuna or the basket containing sweeteners and can just select the container that has what you want and put that back when you’re finished.
Use Lazy Susans and Spice Racks
Spice is essential to making good food, but they're notorious for messing up a pantry. It’s easy to see why, too. The bottles and jars containing things like basil leaves, parsley, and red pepper flakes are typically pretty small -- they take up a lot less space than your 5-pound or 10-pound sacks of flour and sugar, or your heavy canned goods and jarred foods. So it’s pretty easy to just set a spice container on whatever shelf happens to be handy when you’re finished with it. You can squeeze in that skinny bottle of Tabasco or tiny shaker of allspice pretty much anywhere, right?
But that’s the problem – do this enough times, and suddenly all of your spices are spread all over the cabinet. If you’re more creative with flavorings for your food, this can actually add up to a lot of space. And when you’re just setting those small containers anywhere, they’re hard to find the next time you want them. By then, they’ve been shoved behind a jar or under a bag of flour, or are just behind a bunch of other spices.
Grouping your spices together is a good start, but it’s still easy to knock over the ones in the front by reaching for the ones in the back. You can solve this problem with spice racks – if there isn’t room for vertical spice racks, try pull-out wire racks instead. Or place a lazy Susan on the shelf and put your spices on that. This way, you can simply turn the turntable to reach the one that you’re looking for.
Empty Packages Into Stackable Containers
A lot of the food items you might store in a pantry come in bulky, hard-to-store containers. Think oversized boxes of cereal, bags of chips that are half-full of air, and those heavy sacks of flour and sugar. Not only does the packaging take up more space than the actual food item inside of it, but these often tend to slide or move when stored together, pushing other items around and wasting space.
The Foods Guy explains that removing chips from their original packaging and storing them in a sealed container is best for maintaining freshness, and that applies to foods like cereal and crackers too. And you definitely don't want to start a pest infestation in your pantry. Open food may draw them, but the University of Minnesota Extension explains that once they're there, they can get into paper, plastic, or cardboard-enclosed food packages that are still sealed! Best to reduce the chances of being infested at all.
Get plastic or glass containers that fit in your pantry and are easy to stack or line up with each other, open the bulky packages, and empty the food into the containers. You’ll be able to fit them into the pantry more easily, and as a bonus, your items will stay good longer and your pantry will be less likely to end up infested because of open food packages. Just make sure your storage containers have air-tight lids.
Conclusion
You can’t always redesign your kitchen on a whim – sometimes you have to just live with a smaller pantry. But that doesn’t mean you have to live with disorganization and clutter. With a little creativity and some organizational tools, you can have an uncluttered, accessible kitchen storage space.