How I Organize My Measuring Spoons

Faith Durand
Faith DurandSenior Vice President of Content at AT Media
Faith is the SVP of Content at Apartment Therapy Media and former Editor-in-Chief of The Kitchn. She is the author of three cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winning, The Kitchn Cookbook. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and two daughters.
published Jan 15, 2013
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(Image credit: Faith Durand)

I am in the process of setting up a new kitchen, with all the decisions, indecisions, and rearrangements that settling into a new cooking space entails. Every time I start in a new space, there’s fresh resolve to fix the things that drove me crazy in the last one. This time, for instance, I decided to create order out of the tangled mess of my measuring spoons. Here’s how I organized them, and why.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

In my old kitchen, my measuring spoons were piled in one section of the big drawer that held all my other miscellaneous implements like small strainers, Microplanes, and more. They were always mixed up and stuck together and sliding into other areas of the drawer.

I have a lot more space (and drawers) in this kitchen (yes, I feel totally spoiled and it’s a luxury I don’t take for granted one little bit). So I gave one drawer over to measuring spoons and some miscellaneous small tools I use frequently, as well as my salt collection. (The spices are a drawer over.)

I thought about going totally crazy and creating sections of the drawer for each denomination of spoon — from 1/8-teaspoons to 1/2-tablespoons. I remember seeing the tackle box that cookbook author

Grace Young

But, in the end, I felt like this was probably overkill for me. As I thought about it I realized that in most cases, I am reaching either for a teaspoon or a tablespoon. So I separated those out into their own spaces, and left a space between them for everything else.

This has worked so well so far. I can put my hand almost immediately on the measuring spoons I use most frequently, and they’re not too onerous to sort and put away. There’s plenty of space for each kind, and it’s clear what goes where.

And yes, I have a lot of measuring spoons — when cooking up big meals or doing a lot of recipe testing it’s so helpful to have many sets. I have to point out, though, that I was seriously out of whack — I had tons of tablespoons and the mixed fractions, but only two teaspoons! (I have no idea where they disappeared to.) So my husband surprised me with six (yes, six!) individual teaspoons for my birthday last week. Now my compartments are much more evenly distributed!

How do you store and organize your measuring spoons? Do you have a little system like this, or do you just stick them in a jar, or hang them on their ring?

Related: Quick Tip: Separate Your Measuring Spoons!

(Images: Faith Durand)

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