The Care and Storage of Spices

LuckyFatima wrote about how she stores all her spices and invited others to do the same. I meant to do it right away, but I wanted to take some pictures of it and wanted to wait around for good daytime lighting, but the light never came, I guess. Yesterday, though, I just decided to do take the pictures in whatever lighting was available when I got home from work - which means, sorry for the bad lighting :)

So, spices. We have a lot of spices. Pakistani food, which we cook a lot around here, usually calls for a lot of different spices in every dish. We use maybe close to 10-15 very, very commonly, maybe almost every day. Then there are weird spices that we use only in a few dishes, maybe we only use them once or twice a month. I'm not much of a foodie, so I actually never really think about spices going bad and keep them around for probably longer than they need to be kept. We do cook for a lot of people in this house though, so hopefully we're cycling through them so fast they don't have a chance to go bad.

For the regularly used spices, we bought some square jars with glass lids and a plastic-y seal from IKEA back when we first got married. They are not airtight, but they're pretty close.

They're theoretically stackable, and in the first couple of months or years we did stack them but it can be a big pain in the butt to un-stack four jars from on top of the ONE spice you need right then, so we eventually decided to make a shelf for them. Which means I told Mian what I wanted and he built me a shelf.

My spice shelf

Here's where my regularly used spices live in the kitchen. They're on one side of the sink - the oven is on the other side, off to the left of where the picture ends. The spices live right between the cutting boards and the water pitcher. It's a bit further away than I'd like from the stove where all the spices actually get used, but I prefer that over having them right next to the heat of the stove.

For most of the spices, you can tell what the are just by looking at them. Red chili powder on the top, in one of the big jars. Yellow in the middle is tumeric (haldi.) Big and small cardamom (illachi), fennel (saunf), cumin seed (zeera), cilantro and onion seeds (dhuniya and kalonji.) 

From left to right, cardamom, cilantro seed, tumeric and red chili powder.

Some of them are harder to tell - they're all brown powders - so we've labeled the jars. Z is for zeera poweder, D is for dhuniya powder, G is for garam masala powder, C is for chaat masala. We JUST wrote those letters this year, for the past SEVEN years before that we'd either tasted of smelled the different powders to tell the difference. I don't know what took us so long. 

The other, not regularly used or larger quantity spices or ingredients are kept in a pantry off in the opposite corner of the kitchen - on the other side of the oven.

It's usually an unorganized mess, but Dulhan does try to contain my overflow from time to time, so it's only 25% of it's usual messiness here. We keep out atta - whole wheat flour - in the big white metal container on the floor. You can barely see it there because it's covered by a big Costco-sized sleeve of paper cups. The next shelf up from the floor holds lentils (daal) that we use in really big quantities around here. Dulhan and I like to joke that these Bihari men that we married want to eat daal with everything. Sometimes it seems like they can't choke down rice until it's sopping wet under some daal. And strangely, the baby is the same way. He'll struggle with dry-ish rice, but he'll eat daal chaval - rice and lentils together - faster and in much greater quantity. That's the lentils on the next-to-last shelf, the large jars full of small yellow lentils. 

On the other side of that shelf is where we keep pre-mixed spices sold in boxes for special dishes. I like to call them the Hamburger Helper of Indian food, minus the hamburger. We use these to make dishes that are really difficult to get the spices right, or very labor intensive, or whatever other reason. I don't usually like to use these spice mixes, but some of them are actually better than what I can make on my own. That's a whole 'nother post on it's own though, because there is some tension over who uses pre-made spice mixes and who doesn't. Another day we'll tackle that, I promise.

On the next shelf up, we store the spices we use rarely, thinks like anardana - pomegranate seeds, amchur powder - unripe green mango powder, and Ajwain - carom seeds. We also keep the remainders here. That's when we buy the industrial-sized bags of red chili powder, but only 1/4 of it fits in my often-used glass jar by the sink. We store the rest here, then replenish the glass jar after it empties.

Those are my spices! They have changed a bit since Dulhan has moved here because she cooks some different dishes than I used to. I mostly only know how to cook Mian's mother's recipes - mostly pure Bihari north Indian style food. Dulhan is Kutchi and they have some different dishes than I'm used to cooking. Some of the rarely-used spices for me are actually often-used spices for her, so some of the arrangements change from time to time. It's not the best system, it's probably not ensuring the freshness or longevity of my spices, but it works for us. As you can see from my kitchen pictures, we are in need of a major kitchen renovation. It's the original kitchen in our 1975 house and hasn't been changed at all. Maybe when we're able to renovate our kitchen, we'll renovate our spice storage system as well.