Decanting the Kitchen Pantry: Rules to Live By
To decant or not to decant? How to decide for yourself.
If you’ve ever scrolled through Pinterest, Instagram or Facebook, you’ve likely seen beautiful images like these:
We love the look of these spaces as well but, before we ever begin to create systems, we first need ask ourselves this:
Is this something our clients will have the time and energy to maintain?
When it comes to organizing we always start there and then dial in. For the pantry space in particular, we would also dig a little deeper. As much as we want to make a space visually appealing, we have to think about your lifestyle and what’s truly sustainable. In that case, we may also ask questions like these:
Do you frequently buy the exact same items?
Do you love to cook and spend time in the kitchen?
In order to decant your items, you typically want to be purchasing the same items so you have the right number of containers and you aren’t mixing food. For example: do you always buy spaghetti, or do you switch it up between spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine and spaghettini? If you do, you either need containers for all 4 or need to fully eat each version before decanting the next. Not ideal and, in addition, good quality air tight containers can be costly.
Secondly, even if you did have containers for all of it, could you eat all of the food before the expiration date? This is especially true with baking ingredients. Even in airtight containers, flour can go rancid.
As for cooking, if you’re not someone who enjoys spending time in the kitchen, fussing over your pantry is likely not something you’d be prone to do. Every time you grocery shop, you’d need to spend some extra time decanting, organizing and labelling. If that’s in your wheelhouse, then by all means, decant away! But if not, aim for function over Pinterest.
Bright Idea
I, personally, only decant a few items that come in large quantities. I decant our rice, as it comes in a large 15lb bag (just remember to cut out the instructions and tape them to the back). I also decant a few of our main baking ingredients, like flour and sugar, because I find it easier to scoop and measure from a large mouth container rather than the bags they come in. For these, you don’t need to tape instructions, but you should label it somewhere with the expiration date. Also, sometimes a good sniff is all you need to know whether or not something has gone off.
So, if you’re not decanting, what’s the best and tidiest alternative?
Bins, of course! You’ll likely need at least 2 for baking and 1 for your open pasta and grains.
So, in the end, even if your pantry looks more like this…
And not this…
