Eight Tactics to Maximize the Value of Your Pantry

The Sim­ple Dol­lar has great stuff on sav­ing money in cre­ative ways. I got this arti­cle there.

Trent Hamm, The Sim­ple Dollar

The Sim­ple Dol­lar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: peo­ple fight­ing debt and bad spend­ing habits while build­ing a finan­cially secure future and still afford­ing a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough with­out hav­ing to com­pare five hun­dred mutual funds — we just want sim­ple ways to man­age our finances and save a lit­tle money.

My wife and I have an over­stuffed pantry. Some­times, it’s almost dif­fi­cult to get the door closed because we have so much food stocked away. And, to an extent, I’m proud of this: I often view our pantry as one of the most fru­gal places in our home.

This often comes as a sur­prise to peo­ple who visit us — and is per­haps a sur­prise to you as well. Doesn’t food get old in there? Isn’t it waste­ful to have such a huge amount of food on hand? What can you pos­si­bly keep in there that isn’t waste­ful? Aren’t there just tons of things in the back of the pantry that are out of date, just wait­ing to be tossed (and wast­ing money along the way)?

We actu­ally use a num­ber of tac­tics for stock­ing, rotat­ing, and uti­liz­ing our pantry so that the food kept inside has max­i­mum value. Here’s how we do it.

from Left­OverQueen

We eat vir­tu­ally every meal at home. I actu­ally believe this is the key to the whole equa­tion. Our pantry is full, but the stuff inside the pantry gets used all the time. We eat 90% of our meals at home with the four of us seated around a table eat­ing some­thing we’ve pre­pared with the food in our pantry.

We focus mostly on sta­ples with a long shelf life. So, what food is actu­ally in our pantry? Most of our pantry is filled with sta­ples that have a long shelf life. Here’s a quick check­list of the items that take up more than half the space in there: bak­ing pow­der, bak­ing soda, sugar (brown, white, etc.), pasta (many vari­eties), corn meal, corn starch, flour (all-purpose, white, wheat, rye, pumper­nickel, etc.), rice, salt (table salt, sea salt, etc.), spices (a huge num­ber), vine­gar, and dry yeast. Vir­tu­ally all of these items last for years — we buy them and use them until they’re gone.

We buy those sta­ples in bulk. We buy the sta­ples listed above in large quan­ti­ties — big bags of flour, rice, and so forth. By buy­ing them in bulk, we’re able to save a lot of money on the pur­chase of such items, reduc­ing the cost of each and every meal that we eat. And, since these items don’t get old or wear out (well, at least not over a short period), we almost never throw away any of the bulk.

We use air­tight con­tain­ers for many items. One con­cern that many peo­ple have with large quan­ti­ties of sta­ples (like flour, sugar, and rice) is that they’re tar­gets for infes­ta­tion — mold, mice, and so on. Our solu­tion? We store all of our mate­ri­als in jars and buck­ets that are tightly sealed. This keeps the sta­ples as fresh as pos­si­ble and keeps them from being infested.

We rec­og­nize the foods we like and eat them reg­u­larly. We like eat­ing pasta dishes. We like home­made bread and bread­sticks. We like sim­ple stir fries with a vari­ety of spices and some rice on the side. We like tacos and enchi­ladas. We’ll eat these things over and over again — every­one likes them and as long as we don’t eat them every day, we don’t get tired of them. Thus, it makes a lot of sense for us to have a lot of the sta­ples for these recipes on hand.

We rotate our entire pantry reg­u­larly. Of course, many items in our pantry aren’t such sta­ples — they’re other items, pur­chased for spe­cific recipes or because they seemed intrigu­ing. Often, these items will grad­u­ally find their way to the back of the pantry. Our solu­tion to this is sim­ple: about once a month, we rotate every­thing in the pantry. We pull every­thing out and put things back in a new order, bring­ing for­got­ten things to the front. This usu­ally inspires a few days’ worth of din­ner recipes and also keeps us from wast­ing things.

We plan ahead for major dis­as­ters. We also keep sev­eral gal­lons of water in our pantry and also some “ready to eat” meals. Why do we do this? In the event of a major dis­as­ter, where we might be left with­out power for a week or two, we want to be pre­pared with the food and sup­plies on hand that we would need. This takes up some pantry space, of course, and we’re lucky in that we’ve not had to use the sup­plies since mov­ing to our home, but if such an event hap­pened, these items would be worth their weight in gold.

We share. Last sum­mer, on a whim, I made six loaves of zuc­chini bread and gave them to our neigh­bors. Why? I was in the mood to cook, we had an abun­dance of fresh zuc­chini, and there was plenty of ingre­di­ents in the pantry. When I gave over these loaves, vir­tu­ally all of the neigh­bors were very happy to receive them — and it helped us to build a good rela­tion­ship with some of the ones we didn’t know as well. If you have an abun­dance of food and an abun­dance of time, you have the oppor­tu­nity to share the food you make with those around you — and build valu­able rela­tion­ships along the way.

That’s how our pantry rolls.