The Pantry Rules, pt. 1

Well, they're more like "guidelines", really...

This is a hallway right off my kitchen in my house.

Most posts about pantries are presented as lists of things you should have on hand with the specific quantities spelled out, and a lot of people requested that from me as well. I have nothing against these lists (and I will absolutely get into the details of each item in my pantry later!), but I want to talk about my pantry “philosophy” first.

You’ll notice in my other posts about food, I rarely post a full recipe. If I do I share an actual recipe, I end up explaining how I modified it 17 different ways. I view recipes as guidelines, that once you understand the underlying principles of cooking or baking you can adapt to your taste and ingredients preferences. I’m not a hard and fast rules, lists, or formulas type of person.

Similarly, I think pantry lists are a great launching point, but if this is a totally new way of organizing your kitchen/meals/life then there are some basic principles we need to start with before you drop money. Most of us who keep pantries do it to save money, our margins are already thin; there isn’t much room for error when getting started.

So, below are the basic ideas behind building a successful pantry to get you started. This way, in future posts when we start talking about specific categories and items, you’ll be able to successfully decide what to take or leave.

My Pantry Priorities

Versatility

Alton Brown is famous for his animosity towards single-use kitchen tools. I’d take it a step further and say that I hate single use kitchen ingredients, especially in my pantry rotation. I don’t have a ton of storage space, so it’s important that if I’m going to store something I know it will be as useful as possible.

In practice this means that, instead of storing something like pancake mix, I’ll store flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, etc. The components of a ready-made pancake mix can be used to make endless baked goods, whereas pancake mix itself is less flexible. I don’t store cans of premade soups; I store broth, canned/frozen vegetables, dried beans, and canned/frozen meat. All of those components can be used in a variety of ways, whereas canned pre-made soup is just…soup.

I am not against convenience food. I do, however, limit how much of it I store in my pantry to a single, small shelf. I can’t justify having large quantities of single-use ingredients, because if I actually need to dig into my pantry for an extended period of time I will quickly run out of options. If I know there will be a week coming up where I need to rely on convenience food, I try to prep freezer meals or dry mixes myself from ingredients in my pantry ahead of time to save money.

I also love experimenting with new techniques and ingredients in the kitchen, but if money is tight (like it is now for myself and many other people), that experimentation gets pushed aside in the grocery budget for tried and true ingredients. I rarely buy one-off ingredients, and if I do they have to fit on my “convenience food” shelf.

This does not mean you have to eat boring food.

But the way to keep your meals exciting is by making sure the ingredients in your pantry can be transformed into as many options as possible and that you actually know how to cook.

Access

My husband’s paternal grandparents describe themselves as preppers. Unlike many people who claim that title, their desire to be prepared has nothing to do with the apocalypse or climate change or political tensions. Their drive was from a desire to ensure access to food and water for their family, while living on a single, very small salary.

When COVID-19 happened, I called my grandmother-in-law. I explained to her I was scared, had no clue what I was doing, and wanted her advice. The main thing she told me to focus on was stocking up on things I couldn’t make myself. For her, this meant things like white vinegar and salt that could be used for preserving.

My main take away from that conversation is that ensuring access to your staple foods is an essential part of planning a pantry. The most important things to stock up on are the things that would be hardest to replace in your day-to-day cooking. In my pantry, I focus on rice, oats, flour, sugar/sweeteners, white vinegar, vodka, and salt¹. I keep these consistently stocked in larger quantities compared to other pantry items, because they’re my non-negotiables.

It’s important to remember your pantry isn’t a solution to food scarcity. You can’t stockpile enough food to last you the rest of your life. Your pantry is a buffer that can provide short-term access until you are able to find new, more reliable food sources in the face of shortages.

Shelf-Life

Eggs are an incredibly versatile ingredient that were easy to predict rising in cost as news stories about the bird flu began to unfold. They are also, however, perishable making them a poor choice for stocking in your pantry.

We have had chickens and ducks on our homestead for two years now, so eggs are currently not a huge concern for us. However, in order to stretch our egg usage a bit or in case something happens to our flock, I purchased extra ground flax seed to keep in my freezer. Ground flax seed is a cost effective, long-lasting (especially when frozen) alternative for eggs in baking. I no longer have to stress about whether I will be able to make baked oatmeal, cookies, or my kids’ birthday cakes if I can’t get eggs.

When you are deciding what to stock in your pantry, you need to make sure you’re picking things with the longest shelf-life possible that meet your needs. (You also need to ensure you’re properly storing things, which we’ll talk more about in later posts.)

There are some items where you may opt for a more processed version of an ingredient (for example, I keep AP flour over whole wheat flour) to extend shelf-life. Is it the ideal, healthiest, most perfect option for my family’s diet? Probably not. Would I rather have consistent access to an adequate ingredient that functions perfectly fine as the backbone of all my baked goods? Yup.

At the end of the day, always do what works for your family; don’t fall for influencer gimmicks or “must buy” lists.

Paying for Your Pantry

As I’ve said before and I’ll probably say 7,000 more times, money is tight for most people right now. Cooking with a pantry at your back can save you a lot of money; it also takes a lot of hard work to set up. To start and maintain your pantry, you’ll need to rethink your approach to your grocery budget.

Start-Up Cost

There are two simple ways to build up a pantry. The first is to invest a chunk of money (for example, $300-1,000) up front to create an initial back stock. (We did this about three years ago with a portion of our tax return.) This works best if you have a solid idea of your family’s staple ingredients.²

Don’t go into debt trying to build a pantry. That completely defeats the purpose of saving money and creating a physical safety net.

The second option is to take a chunk of your weekly grocery budget (for example, 20%) and use it to make incremental bulk purchases each week. (This is how we will be rebuilding our pantry this year after an extended period of time eating off of it.) In order to make this option work, you need to keep your grocery purchases to an absolute minimum to provide as much wiggle room as possible in your budget.

To do this, you need to save your receipts from your grocery purchases for a few weeks and do a brutally honest assessment. Are you buying pre-made snacks you don’t really need? Are their things you could make from scratch for less money? Are there cheaper alternative options for lunch or breakfast that provide enough calories? Are you cooking a lot of one-off meals that require specialty or unique ingredients? Pare down and consolidate as much as you can to give yourself as much margin as you can to start slowly building a stockpile.

Maintenance Cost

Once you start to acquire a back stock in your pantry, you will need to continue to maintain it. The best way I have found to do so is to dedicate a portion of your weekly grocery budget towards sales and bulk purchases.

In my real life, for my family of six, I have a $200 per week “house budget” that is used to pay for any purchases pertaining to food, cleaning supplies, clothes, shoes, toiletries, etc. I dedicate about $20 each week to buying paper products, cleaning products, and basic toiletries using coupons/sales (I’ll talk more about this in a separate post). I then make a very loose meal plan based on what is in my pantry and what is on sale, purchasing the bare minimum groceries required to fill in the gaps (this normally runs me about $40-90, depending on the week). This means I have about $90-140 leftover in my weekly budget to buy bulk/sale items for my pantry.

Realistically, there are weeks that this money gets spent on buying something like tennis shoes for the kids or work pants for my partner. There are also weeks where instead of buying paper products and stocking my pantry, anything over the “bare minimum groceries” goes towards bills or gas for the car. I try, however, to be diligent about applying extra funds to my pantry as much as possible.

It’s also important to point out that this system only works because I have an existing pantry back stock. If you are still working on incrementally stockpiling, you’re going to have a harder time keeping your minimum grocery budget down. As your pantry grows each week, you’ll notice that you’re reaching for less one-off items at the grocery store and starting to save money. It takes time, patience, and commitment, but you’ve got this.

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Posts on Deck:

I don’t commit to a consistent posting schedule, because I have four kids, a house to run, and this newsletter is donation-based.

However, these are my upcoming planned posts. Each one will discuss a category of food with the appropriate storage requirements and the specific items I keep on hand. I’ll circle back and link them here as they are published:

• Pantry Rules, pt. 1: Well They’re More Like “Guidelines” Really…

• Pantry Rules, pt. 2: Big Goals in Small Spaces

• Getting Started on Pantry Planning

• Pantry Rules, pt. 3: How to Use It All

• Top Shelf: Vinegars & Alcohol in the Pantry

• Cooking Fats & Oils: Why I Don’t Use a Lot of Olive Oil

• Spices & Salt: Keeping Things Interesting

• Dehydrated Foods: It’s More Than Just Orange Slices

• The Big Four: Long-Term Storage Rules

• Baking More Than Just Bread: Categories to Consider

• Nuts, Seeds, Butters: A Complicated Storage Situation

• Grains: The Ultimate Filler

• Beans: What I Keep and How I Store Them

• Shelf of Shame: Why You Should Have a Shelf of Convenience Food

• Canning: When Is It Worth It and How to Not Die

• Freezing Food: What Is Even In There?

• Why You Should Be a Couponer: Paper Goods, Cleaning Supplies, & Toiletries

• $40 Grocery Challenge: My Bare Minimum Grocery List

• The Kitchen Equipment Edition: Essentials and the Back-Up Team

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I’ll be sharing more practical details about how I stock my pantry going forward, so subscribe if you want those newsletters in your inbox.

This work will always be free, however…

…this newsletter does take time and if you would like to support my work financially, I have a ko-fi set up. Every dollar goes straight towards keeping my family afloat while we work to pay down debt and raise four beautiful, wild kids.

And at the end of the day? I’m so glad you’re here. Keep moving forward, friends. There’s always hope, but it takes work to keep that hope alive. You’ve got this.

1. You’ll notice I didn’t include meat, beans, or protein here. In my climate, shelling beans grow phenomenally well and if I needed to I could grow a large crop of beans. I don’t say that lightly, and I wouldn’t say that confidently about any other staple vegetable, but I have the space/skill/seed to make that happen.

I am also incredibly lucky to be apart of a community where many of my friends have the experience and skill to raise/butcher their own meat. I can almost always find someone to buy meat from locally. If you don’t have access to those kinds of resources, you’ll need to consider what proteins are worth keeping on hand for your family.

2. If you aren’t sure what your family is eating, try taking a picture of each meal your family eats for a week or two and save them in an album on your phone. (These don’t have to be pretty, this is just for you to reference.) At the end of a week or two, look through the photos and write down the ingredients you see most frequently repeated. There are likely patterns you haven’t noticed before, and those ingredients are a good launching point.

If you look at your meals and realize there isn’t consistency because you’re relying heavily on convenience or single-use ingredients, try to identify the easiest ones to replace with more versatile staples. For example, could you try making homemade biscuits (flour, baking powder, salt, milk/vinegar or buttermilk, butter) instead of buying a premade bread to go with soup for dinner? Could you try making yogurt, and substituting that for sour cream in recipes as well as use it for breakfasts/snacks? If you’re using a lot of out-of-season produce (which typically costs more) can you focus on cheaper options for the current season?

It is a lot of work to interrogate your food choices and rewire how you approach grocery shopping, cooking, and stocking a pantry. You will have to have honest conversations about what is a need versus what is a want. Give yourself grace and make small, dedicated changes over time to avoid overwhelming yourself. You can do this.