It will easily hold the typical ones you can buy at the grocery store. If you buy bulk containers, it will not hold it all, but I don’t use enough spices to buy them in bulk before they go bad, for most spices.
Honestly, I’m not seeing that as the case. IKEA’S sheet is 14"x30" at $13. To get a steel, not aluminum, baking sheet the same size, it would cost more. The ones that are $13ish are only 14"x16" or so, meaning I’d need two of them.
No spice rack made could hold all the spices we use. So we just scatter items beteen a rack, a cabinet, and the pantry. Sure, you have to dig sometimes, but then you could run across another spice that you had forgotten about that would be better in that particular dish.
Resurrecting a comatose (not quite zombified, I think) thread to say that I finally got around to doing this Elfa system, last weekend, and I LOVE it.
The linked version is platinum; we opted for white as it looks better against the closet doors. We wound up needing 5 of the “spice rack” baskets for normal spice jars and 2 of the “shallow” baskets for larger spice jars (e.g. the big thing of minced onions). I loved it so much on the first day that I went out and got another door holder and a bunch more baskets the next day. We now have all sort of small light things in baskets on the doors, e.g. plastic cutlery, pretzels, cocoa, tea…
The 25% off sale goes through Sunday, I think, in case anyone wants to try to implement this. I’ve got to dash out myself tomorrow and swap some baskets for different sizes.
My mon had some pretty cool spice racks. They were bolted to the bottom of the cabinets, with hinges in back. Then the front flipped down when you pulled on it, kind of like a murphy bed rotated 90 degrees to be on the ceiling.
They only took about 1 inch away from the counter work height(they were custom designed to fold into the hollow under the cabinet between the facing over hangs), which was never an issue, and with three of them under three cabinets, there were a lot of spices handy, right over the main kitchen work area.
I had small drawers made that could be pulled out and moved to where I was cooking. Each drawer holds eight to ten spice bottles. I use them for food decorating supplies and flavorings too. Each contains what I use most for certain things.
You could look at using drawer slide rails to install pull out partitions in a cabinet. The partitions can be the sideways spice racks with rails to hold them in.
It could be something like this, but I wouldn’t do that on the base cabinets. I was thinking you could use a whole upper cabinet and install multiples of this type inside. You would have them fit behind the existing door. I had a cabinet like that site using it for can storage. It worked great.
I ended up doing the magnetic canisters thing - took the frame off a magnetic whiteboad and stuck it on the back of a cabinet. I think I have maybe 40 on there, and less used ones inside the cabinet. It is AWESOME - my daily life has been much improved by this.
Another vote for the magnetic canisters. Here’s my set-up.
I have this spinning spice rack: Amazon.com 48 spices and a small footprint.
One issue with the glass jars somewhere you can see is that many spices should be stored in the dark. I use glass jars kept in the windowless pantry so they are in the dark most of the time. but the magnetic jars on the wall look cool as heck!
I recounted - I actually have 7 of the spice-rack baskets. Each one holds up to 9 standard jars. I’ve got some spare room on a couple of the shelves (and a couple of duplicate bottles, courtesy of the old disorganized method).
I love all the nifty options including the magnetic board solution, but this wound up being the least amount of work (no re-jarring) and greatest flexibility, as well as an opportunity to use up a lot of unusable cubic footage: the pantry shelves stop about 8 inches back from the doors. so half the pantry volume was going to waste.
I hate to be a party-pooper here, but wouldn’t a “real cook” have very few dried spices? I can understand having a dozen or so things like cinnamon powder, cream of tartar and mustard powder since these things aren’t easy to produce in powdered or ground form even if you have the raw materials on hand. But things like garlic powder, ginger and minced onion? These spices are commonly found in the produce section and easily minced or ground on the spot.
Of course that just means the ginger root sits in a wicker basket on the countertop along with the garlic cloves and shallots instead of in powdered form on a spice rack, but I digress.
And don’t get me started on garlic salt. I’m not even sure why that exists in the first place. I already have garlic and salt. What’s next to take up space on a spice rack; cinnamon-sugar?
Sorry, I had a little Andy Rooney moment there.
Anyway, some of the spice shelves linked in this thread look nice. I just think that the bigger a spice shelf gets, the farther away we are getting from the “real cook” mentioned by the OP.
There are a lot of times when you need a dried spice rather than a fresh one - baking with fresh ginger is very different, for example, than with dried ground ginger IMHO. I keep both. Likewise, there are things like dry rubs where I want dry garlic and onions. I have a ton of dry spices I use all the time, plus similar whole things like nutmeg and star anise and peppercorns and bay leaves that it’s hard to keep track of in little bags. For example: cumin, paprika, cream of tartar, chile powder, cayenne pepper, allspice, mace, garam masala, coriander, caraway seeds, celery seeds, fennel seeds, curry powder, cinnamon, ground cloves, tumeric - that’s just off the top of my head. Plus I like some pre-mixed blends. I mean, I certainly don’t use dried basil, never gotten the point of that, but there are plenty of dried herbs and spices that “real cooks” need.
ETA - the problem with the overshelf is that in a home kitchen you won’t use them fast enough to not have them ruined by the heat of the stove.
I made a new thread rather than mess up this perfectly nice spice rack discussion any further:
That is so bizzare. I only have on lazy susan but I basically have all the exact same kroger brand spices, the Lea and perrins and even the exact same olive oil as you. What are the odds of that?
I guess I wasn’t clear enough, but by “real cook” and “real kitchen”- I meant “a professional chef” and a “commercial, or restaurant kitchen”. I was kind of being funny and gfeeky with that suggestion. Overshelfs like that, are often common in large professional kitchens and one common use, is to rack spices. Professional kitchens however, deal in bulk amounts of spices, so the racks are usually stacked with the large, “bulk”, containers of spices and herbs hence the large size of the shelf. Pro Kitchens certainly use a combination of fresh and dried herbs and spices dependent on the dish or recipe and its flavor profile, every dried spice you might find in a home kitchen is usually in a well stocked pro kitchen, and then some. The spice “overshelf” in a kitchen I worked in was at least that large and fully stocked with a huge variety of dried spices and herbs behind the line, away from the direct heat over top of a giant stainless steel prep table.
Kitchens are for cooking.
4 inch wide shelf above the stove. multiply as needed.
However, the saffron, marsala, and other cooking wines and brandies were locked up in the Chef’s office… 