How do you keep your spices?

When my grandma died and it felt to me to clean up her house, I threw away little cans of spices that I’m pretty sure were 50 years old. On a lark, I tasted some, and they were flavorless.

So I don’t want to keep them out where they’re just going to go bad. But if you freeze them, you have to wait for them to come up to room temperature before you open the vessel or water will condense on them and they’ll spoil. So we keep a small portion ready to go at room temperature and we keep our main supply in the freezers.

We bought a system of little hexagonal jars that have a magnet in the lid so that they can stick to the front of one of the fridges. And we use those for our daily use. And then most of our spices are right below that in a freezer drawer, but we have things like frozen chiles in freezers all over the house. (Four freezers here.)

How do you manage the situation?

Those are cool jars :)

I do similar to you... but without the freezer. I keep a small jar available for everyday use, and the rest stays sealed in canning jars until I'm ready to refill the smaller container.

Do you vacuum seal the jars or anything? I could just have a half gallon jar of cumin seeds on the counter -- refilling as needed, and they'd never go bad. But other stuff like sage, we want to have it around for occasional use, but I do most of the cooking and it's not really part of my vernacular, so it hardly ever gets used. It would go bad if we weren't freezing it, I think.

We vacuum-seal half-gallon canning jars of beans for long-term storage in the garage.

So far, I go through enough that I have not needed the vacuum sealing... but I do intend to do that.

Obviously I'm a little biased :)... but I would have suggested the same thing before my business. If you have a herb/spice that you do not use much... it might be worth only keeping a small amount, and buy fresh when needed. Make some company somewhere go through the pain of keeping it fresh for you :)

i have an entire cabinet drawer specifically for (most of my) spices, which are kept in small glass jars out of the light and humidity. I keep some bags for refilling, generally another small jar's worth for the things I use most, almost all whole spices or leaves (not ground spices, with the exception of cardamom, which I only get when I travel).
Onion and garlic powder are kept in the freezer. I wish I had the freezer space to store more spices (and flour, and beans, and etc et cetc etc....) but I don't.

I have a cabinet with spices and a drawer and a box ....

Christopher, did you put magnets on the spice jar lids?

I would never have thought about putting them on the fridge door.  I only have pretty hummingbird magnets.

Anne Miller wrote:Christopher, did you put magnets on the spice jar lids?

Mostly no -- they came that way: https://gneissspice.com/

But we have a couple of jars which you can see on the left side of the top picture where we took one of the Gneiss magnets and just put it in the lid of another jar rather than transferring the contents to a hex-jar. They're things we're going to use up and not restock.

We have a spice drawer for everyday use and refill from jars of whole spices in largers jars that we dry roast and grind as needed.

I am an admitted spiceaholic. I have 10 spice racks in the kitchen plus a couple of dedicated cabinets.  I have maybe a couple dozen half gallon jars in the basement with oxygen absorbers.  Of course, one has to recognize one has a problem when one doesn’t simply has a jar that’s labeled Basil, but there are 10 jars labeled with different kinds of Basil.

I buy most spices in bulk (half a pound to 2 pounds at a time). I probably don’t keep them in the best possible way, but they still taste good after 3+ years stored in this way, so it’s good enough for me:

1. A big spice rack mounted to the wall keeps small amounts of most things for day to day use in jars of various sizes in the kitchen.
2. In a 2 1/2 gallon bucket I have bags of ‘sweet’ spices like ginger, gloves, cardamon, cinnamon, and other stuff like that gets used sometimes in delicate dishes where I don’t want any hint of curry flavours getting into it. I also keep a bag of psyllium husk for GF baking in this bucket.
3. In a 5 gallon bucket I have bags everything else - peppercorns, chili flakes, cumin, coriander, garam masala, turmeric and probably others.

I keep the buckets in our pantry/larder, which is cooler than the kitchen, and helps them keep for longer.

When the small jars run out (or are running very low), I refill them from the bulk bags. The buckets that the bulk bags are in keep the spices fairly airtight.

Since I own a little grocery store, I tend to buy herbs and spices there as I need them (apart from the herbs like sage, parseley, bay and mint that are easy for me to grow). I have one little spice rack near the stove which I use for herbs and spices that I throw in when I'm cooking, and since it isn't big enough for everything I use, I keep the spices I use more for baking with my ingredients in the larder corner opposite the cooker.
One or two pots of bulk herbs with the year's harvest are in larger jars on the kitchen dresser. I think I only have oregano and parsley in bulk stock at the moment.
Bay leaves live on the tree (tiny as yet) outside, and I just pick a leaf when I need it!