Dear The Kitchen,

What's the best way to store dried spices that maintains freshness but also makes it easy to work with them?

Spice racks drive me crazy. I haven't found one that is easy to use, clearly labeled, with containers that are large enough to store an entire bag of dried spices.

I've noticed how Alton Brown stores his spices in small tin cans with Velcro on the back, attached to strips of Velcro on the doors of his cupboard, but we don't have the room in our tiny kitchen for this system, sadly.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Neil

Dear Neil,

We store our spices in 3oz glass bottles from the Container Store, with hand-written labels made from white tape (we gave up the label-maker the first time it ran out of tape). But this system might not be as "easy to work with" as you'd like. You also may be looking for something larger than 3oz (although if you have a tiny kitchen, you probably will have to give up keeping such bulk spices on hand!), and of course there are glass jars available in an array of sizes at stores like the Container Store, and often your local hardware store.

An alternative would be to install a metal strip on a wall in your kitchen for these Stainless Magnetic Spice Tins with Rotating Clear Top from Fantes.com (item #3515)

Perhaps some of our ingenious readers have some other creative ideas?