Report: Spice Containers
If you buy your spices in bulk, you probably take your spices home in little plastic baggies. Over time, the constant opening and closing, inserting of spoons, and throwing in the back of the cupboard makes these cheap bags wear out. Eventually they’ll tear and the spices will spill all over or, even worse, air circulation will cause the spices to lose their flavor. And we all know how flavorless spices turn our tried-and-true recipes into comedic performances as we dump gallons of bland turmeric into the lentils, frantically searching for enough flavor.
Here at the Budget Gourmet Kitchen, we love bulk spices: the quality tends to be much higher, and the price cheaper, than the pre-packaged kind. But we needed to solve the storage issue. A good spice container should form a perfect seal to keep the flavor in, and should be open-and-closeable nearly ad infinitum. They should be available in a variety of sizes (do you need as much white pepper on hand as you do paprika? We sure don’t). We prefer see-through material, because spices are pretty (but keep those spices shaded! Sunlight can cause dreaded flavor loss as well). For bonus points, the containers will be washable and recyclable. And of course, cheap.
The solution came to us at the grocery store: baby food containers. Perfect seal? Check. Open-and-closeable? For the most part (keep reading for the caveat). See through? Yup. Washable, recyclable, cheap? Slam, bam, thank you ma’am.
These airtight jars come in a range of sizes, from one ounce to three. Not to mention, you can find them for as cheap as 25¢ each. So what are you waiting for? Go to the store, pick out a dozen baby food jars, clean, fill with spices, and label. Voilà.
The only down side? After repeated use, some jars seem to seal a little too well. We’ve been using these spice jars for a couple months, and we’re finding that if we close them as tight as we can, they take some serious effort to reopen. The solution? Don’t crank them shut! Finger tight is fine.
PROS: Great seal, reusable, cheap, transparent containers available in a variety of sizes.
CONS: Can seal a little too well sometimes, so make sure you only finger-tighten the lids.
COMPARE: Baby food jars are 25¢ ~ 75¢ each. IKEA and Target sell five-ounce spice jars with mediocre seals for $3 ~ $4 each.
THE NEXT LEVEL: For the truly thrifty, stalk parents buying food for their babies and offer to collect the empty jars.
Tags: containers, recycle, Report, spices
June 13th, 2008 at 7:56 am
I’m a second-generation Cara Mia marinated artichoke heart jar girl. My mother used these jars because her stepfather did a business deal with Cara Mia in the ’60s and got several cases of product. She got the jars and the rest is family culinary history.