Most home cooks have a pantry full of dusty spice jars from a recipe they made one time in 2019. Cardamom pods, sumac, that bag of saffron from a friend who went to Spain. These things are not earning their shelf space. The best home cooks we know keep a tight seasoning pantry of about a dozen items they touch every week.
The core list looks like this: kosher salt and flaky finishing salt; black peppercorns whole; granulated garlic; granulated onion; smoked paprika; cumin seed; bay leaves; dried oregano; red pepper flakes; ground cinnamon; nutmeg whole; and one or two house blends, like a cajun seasoning and a coffee bark rub. That is the entire kit you need to cook 90 percent of the recipes you will actually make this year.
A few rules of the pantry. Buy whole spices and grind them as you use them; ground spices die in six months. Store everything out of direct sunlight in glass jars, not plastic. Write the purchase date on the bottom of every jar in pencil so you can tell when it is time to replace it. And do an honest cull twice a year. Anything you have not used in six months goes in the trash. You will cook better when your seasoning shelf is alive instead of fossilized.
Like this kind of writing? The journal is part of what your membership funds. Start a 30-day free trial.