Organizing Spices

My milchig spice grinder needed refilling.  The evening before, I had tried to season halibut fillets to pan-fry for supper.  Some olive oil to coat, a splash of salt, and a few grinds of pepper on each surface.  It needed little more.  To get the waning volume of peppercorns to grind, I had to shake the grinder a few times to redistribute those on the bottom.  Seasoning was scant but adequate.  I have a pareve grinder and ground pepper in its tin, but what I did would suffice for supper.

This morning I opened the closet with milchig dishes.  The salt shaker and pepper mill sit to the right of the plates, lowest shelf, in my line of sight.   I could see the near depletion of the peppercorns through the transparent plastic grinder.  All my spices have homes in the pantry, a middle shelf to the left.  My system for dealing with seasonings could use a big revision.  Basically, I pull out what I need for various recipes as I need them.  For Thanksgiving, my biggest annual preparation event, I will go through much of the collection.  As I locate a spice jar needed for a recipe, I relocate it to the dining room table.  When all accounted for, each seasoning gets placed with the recipes that require them.  My storage system is not entirely random, though.  There are shelves for the more expensive and frequently used spices.  On the back ledge I keep meat seaonings, poultry and beef, premixed blends apparently taste tested by food scientists who create a hedon index before scaling up the combination for mass production.  I use Old Bay for many fish preparations.  That has a dedicated conspicuous place.  Most though, get used, then returned to the spice shelf towards the front.  Things used hardly at all end up eventually towards the back, where they should be.

Among my collection, a very significant selection of flavor enhancers, I have pure spices like cinnamon or nutmeg, but I also have blends such as zaatar and masala.  My shelf intermingles them.  And they are not alphabetized or sorted by sweet/savory collections.  So I found myself needing a peppercorn refill but no ready means of locating them amid the other bottles.  I didn't even remember what brand of peppercorns I bought or when I purchased them.  So began my spice repertoire treasure hunt.  I took a few bottles out at time, placing them in random order first on an empty portion of a wire overdoor shelf, then onto the kitchen table.  While I didn't capture anything I didn't already know I had, I identified duplicates and tastes that I should introduce more.  Some bottles were ancient, probably far enough past prime to not enhance any recipes in a meaningful way.  I found blends that I've underused, Italian, Jerk, Chili Lime.  The peppercorn bottle, plastic house brand, sat along the side of the collection.  The bottle was larger than most but without a distinctive top that would have identified it without having to read that bottle's label.

I took it from the pantry to my kitchen workspace.  Not wanting to do this again in the near future, I filled the milchig grinder about two thirds of the way up, replaced the top and returned it to its home in the milchig closet.  Then I took the fleishig mill, a wooden one that I've had for many decades with a means of setting the fineness of the grind, and filled that about halfway to the top.  Peppercorn bottle, still about half full, got returned to where I had found it, though considering how long I expect it to be before either mill requires refilling, its optimal home might be a different location.

For the spices now on my kitchen table, I did some sorting.  Rarely used go in the back, blends towards the front.  Bottles of waning supply to the front, though for each of those I have a fresher duplicate.  While my system is really a non-system of locating what I need when I need it, do I need to create a better one?  Probably not.  I do not prepare that many immense menus.  Seder comes from a different collection of seasonings.  Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Wife's Birthday, Thanksgiving.  I try to have dinner guests about five times a year, usually Shabbos or a Jewish festival.  For those, menus prepared two weeks in advance and recipes set on the dining table two days in advance, I can just go on my periodic spice search.  I probably should throw out those long past prime or unlikely to ever by used again.  That would create more room.  If a recipe ever mandates what had been discarded, it can be replaced and the date of purchase put on the bottle with a Sharpie.

My kitchen serves as my hobby.  Seasonings are essential tools, whether from recipes or for daily suppers, where I decide what to add to a bowl of spaghetti as it boils or to my salmon croquette mix as I put the substantive components in the mixing bowl.  Random is not ideal.  Placement of the spices in storage should make more sense.  Yet organizing them seems a low-yield effort.  Locating the peppercorns took 10-15 minutes and enabled a census of what I already had.  It will not need repeating for another year or two.  The elegant dinners always require hunting for what the recipes specify, though I make occasional modifications. I will return what I took from the closet to the kitchen table back to the closet in a more thoughtful way.  Reconstructing my system seems not worth the effort.