What’s In Your Pantry? October 3, 2007

Novice cooks get screwed. There are cooking basics that no one remembers to teach you. A good cookbook will tell you how to test a meat for doneness, plenty of them will even tell you how to boil an egg, and some will even guide you through the process of setting a banquet table (thanks, Joy Of Cooking!). All that is great, but there are still plenty of things they don’t tell you. Like, for example, what ingredients you should always have on hand.

It’s not as obvious as you’d think, and especially if you grew up in a house that didn’t do a lot of cooking from scratch, it can be a pretty daunting question. If you’re moving out on your own, or getting started as a cook, there are some basic ingredients you want in your pantry. This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything that’s good to have on hand, but it is the essentials.

Here’s what you need, and why you need it:

Dry Goods

Flour: Well, this is obvious. Aside from baking, flour is also useful as a thickening agent for sauces. You want regular, All-Purpose flour; other speciality flours are best purchased when you’ll need them for specific recipes. Store in a cool, dark location in a sealed container, ditch the paper bag your flour came in and invest in a canister.

Double Acting Baking Powder: A leavening agent that won’t see much use if you don’t bake, however it almost never spoils and if you do any baking you should have it on hand. You can keep it in that cute little canister it comes in.

Baking Soda: Another leavening agent. Comes in that iconic yellow box, and you can leave it in there in a cool, dry place. Note: Baking Powder is Baking Soda plus a base, they’re not the same thing and you cannot substitute one for the other blindly.

Cornstarch: Used as a thickener in a lot of recipes, and as a binding agent in puddings, also useful for mixing with water to entertain your kids. Store in a cool, dry place but you can leave it in the box.

Pasta: Keep a package of spaghetti and a package of penne, rotini or some other dry pasta on hand, they keep for a long time and with just a couple of ingredients you can put together a delicious meal.

Cornmeal: Of course, most famously this is used for cornbread, but it has plenty of other applications. Keep it around.

Spices and Herbs

It’s always great to have fresh herbs when you can, but there are some basic dried things you should always have on hand. Later, I’ll be doing detailed explorations of your spice cabinet and its inhabitants, but for now, here’s a list of the bare minimum you should have on hand.

Basil
Cayenne Pepper
Chili Powder
Cinnamon
Crushed Red Pepper
Cumin
Garlic Powder
Mustard Powder
Nutmeg
Oregano (leaf, not ground)
Paprika
Pepper
Rosemary
Sage
Salt
Thyme

A note on salt and pepper. Go ahead and get a pepper grinder, even if it’s just the cheap ones they sell at the grocery store, the difference is worth the added effort. As for salt, you’ll probably want to have two kinds on hand. The regular, iodized table salt that you’re used to, and sea salt or kosher salt.

Sweeteners

Yeah, what can I explain, they sweeten things.

Granulated White Sugar: Again, obvious, this is the sweet stuff. Store in a canister similar to the one you got for your flour.

Brown Sugar: Get Dark Brown Sugar, it’s called for more often than light, and you can fake light brown sugar by combining two thirds dark and one third white sugar. Store in an airtight container with a piece of bread to maintain moisture levels.

Honey: There are many kinds of honey, and if you’re making a dish that features honey, I urge you to go out and get the fresh stuff, but for basic sweetening in baking and cooking, that stuff that you get in the supermarket is fine. Honey never goes bad, if it crystallizes just put the container in hot water for a while and it will go back to its golden, liquidy state.

Light Corn Syrup: This is one of those items that’s far less critical if you don’t plan to do much baking and dessert making. If you don’t have a sweet tooth, you can leave it off.

Molasses: Good for baking but also a must for many barbecue sauces and other dishes as well.

Vanilla Extract: Okay, this is more of a flavorer than a sweetener, gimme a break, I didn’t have anywhere else to put it. There are many, many other extracts available, but vanilla is the one used most often. Also, pay the extra buck for the real stuff, please.

So, those are the bare basics that you should have on hand. We’ll explore ingredients far behind the basics as we continue, but if you’re just starting out, well, this is a good place to start.