Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (14 page)

A kitchen that has been thoughtfully organized greatly helps in the process of preparing a meal. You will have a more relaxed time cooking if you are able to quickly find what you are looking for and have confidence that you have the right tool for the task at hand.

Julia Child’s kitchen took the adage “a place for everything and everything in its place” to its logical conclusion: pots and pans were hung on pegboards that had outlines drawn around each item to ensure that they were always returned to the same location, knives were stored above countertops on magnetic bars where she could easily reach out to take one, and common cooking ingredients — oil, vermouth — were placed next to her stovetop. Her kitchen was organized around the French method
near to hand
, in which tools and common ingredients are kept out in the open and located near the cooking station where they would normally be used.

PHOTO BY NICOLE LINDROOS (FLICKR COM USER NIKCHICK, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Julia Child’s kitchen is part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection, including her pots and pans, which she hung on pegboards for easy access.

Ideally, every item in your kitchen should have a “home” location, to the point where you could hypothetically grab a particular spice jar or pan while blindfolded and without second thought. (This isn’t hypothetical for everyone — how else would the blind cook?) This avoids the frustration of digging through a dozen jars to find the one you’re looking for. In practice, this isn’t always worth the work, but try to keep your kitchen organized enough to be able to select what you’re looking for with a minimum of shuffling.

Store spices in a drawer to speed up the search for any given jar. For extra geek cred, sort them alphabetically (e.g., allspice on the left, wasabi on the right), so that you can use a tree-traversal search algorithm (see
http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/book/spicelabels/
for labels). If you don’t have a drawer available, at least make sure to store them in a dark cupboard and not above the stove, where they would get hot.

Instead of keeping spice containers in a cupboard, where they get stacked
N
deep (invariably resulting in endless digging for a container that turns out to be right in front), see if you have a drawer where you can see them from the top down. If they’re too tall for you to close the drawer, check to see if there is a way to modify the drawer to give you more clearance. In my kitchen, the cabinet had a nonstructural 1.5” wooden slat at the front that, once removed, allowed for storing the bottles upright. I slapped labels on the tops of all my jars to make it easier to find things. (Why is it that a solid third of all spices seem to start with the letter C? Cinnamon, Cardamom, Cumin, Caraway, Cloves...)

For pull-out drawers or fridge doors with a top-down view, labeling the top gives a quick way to find an item.

Hanging up pots, pans, and strainers not only ensures you have a convenient “home” location for each item, but also frees up the cabinet space that they would otherwise occupy. In my kitchen, I created a hanging system using supplies from the hardware store:
S
hooks and a steel
L
beam with holes every few inches (an outside corner support for drywall, made in steel, not aluminum!).

Consider storing your everyday kitchen tools near the food items with which they are most commonly used. This approach cuts down on the number of trips between cupboards and counters. That is, instead of having a drawer for storing measuring spoons, measuring cups, small mixing bowls, garlic presses, etc., store those items next to the foods with which they are commonly used:

There are several benefits to using food-grade storage containers for bulk items such as flours, sugars, salts, beans, rices, cereals, grains, pastas, lentils, chocolate chips, cocoa powder, etc. Using standard-sized containers makes optimal use of space, and using plastic containers for storage keeps pantry moths in check. Pantry moths (weevils) can enter your kitchen as free riders in packaged dry goods such as grains or flours. If you’re concerned, freeze newly purchased bags of rice, beans, flour, etc. for a week before transferring their contents to storage containers.

Storing dry bulk goods in standardized containers is a more efficient use of space and prevents spills from torn paper bags. If you have the cupboard space, consider getting wide-mouthed containers for flour and sugar that are big enough for you to scoop directly from.

I store my bulk items in food-grade PVC containers, roughly 3” × 3” × 12” / 7 cm × 7 cm × 30 cm, that I purchased online from U.S. Plastic Corp. (
http://www.usplastic.com
, search for “PVC clear canister with lid”). Look for a product that has a screw-on lid and meets FDA standards, that has clear sides so that you can clearly see the
food inside, and that has a narrow enough opening that you can easily pour from the container into dry measuring cups without spillage. (For flour, you might want to use one of the larger Cambro storage containers.)

If you have a particular food product that you buy regularly that comes in a suitable container (
mmm, licorice!
), you might be able to reuse the empty containers and skip the expense of buying new ones. As with spices, I label the tops of the containers and store them so that I can view the labels at a glance. This way, they can be stored sideways in a cabinet for a front view or in a pull-out drawer for top-down access.

Should you have the luxury of designing your own kitchen, there is one rule that can make a profound difference: design your space so that you have three distinct countertop or work surfaces, each of which has at least 4 feet / 1.2 meters of usable space. Think of it like swap space: without enough space for raw ingredients about to be cooked (first counter), plates for cooked food (second counter), and dirty dishes (third counter), your cooking can crash mid-process as you try to figure out where to stack that dirty pan. This isn’t to say the three counter sections will always be used for those three functions, but as a rule of thumb, having three work surfaces of sufficient length (and depth!) seems to make cooking easier.

If your current kitchen setup violates the three-counter, four-feet rule, see if you can come up with a clever way to extend a countertop or create a work surface. If you have the space, the easiest option is to buy a “kitchen island” on wheels, which you can move around as needed and also use to store common tools. If you don’t have the space for a floating island, see if there’s a spot where you can mount a cutting board onto a wall, hinged in such a way that you can latch it up out of the way while not cooking. Or, you might be able to extend a countertop over an unused space. (Ikea sells excellent and cheap wooden kitchen countertops.)

I once had a studio apartment with two feet of counter space in a tiny galley-style kitchen. I was able to add another work surface by building a “temporary” counter that spanned the galley space: I screwed a 2” × 4” board to the wall opposite the sink and found a cutting board large enough to span from wall to sink. Two dowel pins kept the board from moving. Whenever I needed the counter space, I could just pick up the board and drop it into place. It was simple, cheap, and easy — and well worth the two hours of time it took to put it in place.

If hacking your kitchen space isn’t for you, you might still be able to reclaim some space through judicious relocation of kitchen appliances from counter to cupboard (do you really use that bread maker every day?). Spending a few hours creatively reorganizing your counter setup will avoid a lot of potential headaches down the road.