Your kitchen pantry is an essential part of running a frugal household. In an ideal world, you should have months of food sitting on the shelf waiting for you to “shop” for your next meal.
Yet the modern pantry is a fraction of what it once was. Gone are the days of large pantries. Instead, modern homes have limited storage or even none at all! You are expected to shop for every meal, and with limited space this means constant shopping.
By getting you to shop more, grocery stores make more money, and your budget is significantly higher. And that’s not the worst part.
I would estimate that 70% or more of the grocery store is focused on meals in a box or kit. Premade foods fill our shelves, and with a short lifespan, it’s impossible to stock up for the long term.
A from-scratch frugal pantry aims to correct these problems by stocking up core staples which you can then turn into most of the items your family eats. You trade convenience for healthy eating and longevity in the kitchen. A trade well worth it on many homesteads and in all from-scratch kitchens.
Thinking about your frugal from-scratch pantry
Cooking from scratch opens a world of possibilities. And the primary key to being able to cook from scratch is a well-stocked pantry with lots of core staples. No longer full of boxes that only make a specific meal, these core ingredients unlock abilities.
From a single can of diced tomatoes, my meal could go in any direction. From Mexican to Italian, American to southern BBQ. The sky is the limit to what I can make.
Stocking your pantry shouldn’t be a chore, or exercise in trying to plan the meals you might want to eat for a month (or 6 months) from now. Instead, it becomes a simple inventory of what you need to bring the levels up to par for the month.
And that’s great from a preparedness and a frugal, money saving standpoint.
Preparedness comes easy with a from-scratch pantry
When you think of preparedness and food storage essentials, you are commonly thinking of what I can get that’s freeze dried or some other nonsense. Inevitably, what ensues is a large stockpile of things you won’t eat, that eventually go bad. Sure, it might take 20 years, but if you don’t want to eat it now, why would you later?
A from-scratch pantry instead focuses on gathering and stocking up on the core ingredients you use every single day. Instead of 3 cans of tomatoes on the shelf, you stock 36. 1 month becomes 6 months. And so, on it goes.
Saving money is easy with a frugal pantry
If you now have 36 cans of tomatoes on the shelf, when you need one, you shop from your pantry. This allows you to purchase not on demand but on sale.
Let me give a great example. Each year, normally around the holidays, our local store puts canned vegetables on sale for around 50% off. If I purchase the vegetables at regular price, I spend $1.25 per can. On sale this last year, they were $0.68 each. A significant savings.
If I was always shopping on demand, I would always end up paying $1.25. By having back stock, I can shop during this sale and save dollars over regular price. I only need to stock up with the sales that are happening.
The same thing happens with 80-90% of all core staples, if you time it right.
Now that you have the basics, let’s cover what should be part of your pantry staples. The purpose of this article is not to give you a pantry essentials list with exact counts but teach you how to build a list and inventory that fits your family and lifestyle.
Dry Goods Foundation
A well-stocked pantry starts with the dry goods. These have variable shelf lives depending on the item and the format. Whole grains and low processed foods last considerably longer than ground or processed. The trade off comes from the need for tools to process grains into flour, etc.
Store as much as you have room for, and you can safely consume in a period of time to avoid expiration and waste.
Wheat & Oats
Wheat is a big item. It’s used in everything, from bread to noodles, gravy, soups and so much more. Off the shelf at most supermarkets, you will find a large variety of flour. Specialty stores will carry even more variety. Bulk stores commonly carry wheat berries.
Unless you are totally hard core, I recommend a mix of hard wheat berries (with a grinder) and ground flours. Flour is best as unbleached flour or whole wheat flour. While these will have a shorter life span because of the wheat bran, you get way more nutrients.
Stick with varieties you plan to eat and avoid specialty versions unless you have a specific use for them.
Oats commonly come rolled. You want old fashioned style oats, not quick oats. Remember, the less processed the food is, the better it will be for long term storage. Whole oats and an oat mill are also another option.
When it comes to whole wheat, we purchase 25lb bags from Great River. Ground and specialty flours are typically from Bob’s Red Mill, such as this Buckwheat Flour or Corn Masa Harina.
Dried Beans & Legumes
Beans are great filler foods. Dried varieties take up little space and once soaked expand greatly stretching your food dollars even farther.
The most common for us are black, kidney, and white beans. Of course, under those comes a massive variety of styles and names. When choosing which to store on your shelves, plan for what varieties your most common and favorite family meals use.
When stored properly, beans and legumes have a long (like 30+ years in some cases) shelf life. This makes them easy to store and rotate as you use them. You can even split your storage, starting with dried, and then pre-cook and pressure can a small amount for quick usage later.
Sugars & Sweeteners
Many recipes call for sugar. Our culture has adapted to prefer everything sweet. And some of these recipes use way too large a quantity, causing health issues. But sweeteners do have a place in your pantry staples, no matter what your views on them.
Most common here is plain old white sugar. For health reasons, I would store only a smaller reasonable amount. In our house, we have worked on swapping plain sugar with raw varieties, or natural versions such as real maple syrup or honey.
Fats & Oils
I don’t know of too many recipes that don’t call for some kind of fat or oil. But there are many directions you can go when creating a pantry stock of these items, plus an insane amount of conflicting information on what is best for your health.
From our point of view, long before there were processed oils such as vegetable oil, butter and lard made up a large part of the oil and fat consumed. I would rather stick with low processed food over something that requires huge chemical inputs to produce something of lesser quality.
Our go-to staples in this area are coconut oil, avocado oil, and olive oil. Any unrefined versions of these will typically last well on a shelf (stored cool and dark) and can be used in most cooking and baking applications.
For lard, we collect up bacon drippings and store them in the fridge or freezer. Most store-bought varieties contain random ingredients to make it shelf stable. Eliminating junk is key to from-scratch healthy eating.
Butter is stored in the fridge and freezer and purchased as only pure butter. That is milk or cream as the only key ingredient with salt on the side. We do not buy margarine or other butter substitutes because the majority of the ingredients are processed seed oils, treated so they become solid.
Herbs, Spices, & Seasonings
Spices are the core to flavor in your house and a critical pantry staple. Even the most basic ingredients need a little spice to transform basic to amazing.
We have found that while most spices and seasonings list a one year shelf life, that can easily stretch to many years if stored properly. Herbs and spices that we use regularly, we stock more of. Others we stock sparingly to avoid large bottles of flavorless seasoning.
In some cases, you can add more to counteract spices that lose flavor. But there could be mixed results, so start small and add stock to your pantry based on consistent usage.
Our main spices start with garlic, onion, salt, and pepper. From there we branch out to ginger, chili powder, cumin, and sage. Many of these we can grow through small indoor and outdoor herb gardens.
When it’s growing season, we utilize fresh when possible. Best case, split your usage diverting half to be dried and stored for out of season needs.
In this category you will also find things like vanilla.
We prefer to avoid buying vanilla and instead have purchased (and stocked) vanilla beans and alcohol to produce homemade vanilla. It not only tastes better, but it also costs way less than store-bought real vanilla and is made clean vs. artificial versions.
Canned Pantry Staples
While I would love to say that we home-can everything we use, it’s not possible for us to grow and store all those things. It’s a nice idea, but rarely achievable in today’s age. Not something to be ashamed of.
Store purchased items require less up-front learning, skills, and time. We are big fans of using what you have available to you and starting where you are. So, start with store-bought goods and work your way into replacing them as time and abilities allow.
Canned Vegetables
At the beginning of a well-rounded pantry are canned vegetables. These should be simple, single or few ingredient items.
The most common examples are canned beans, tomatoes, corn, and beets. Make sure to read the ingredients and choose ones that are free from added seasonings. You want simple items that can be combined into many different recipes.
We personally avoid things like canned carrots and stock minimal peas that only get used in certain soup recipes. They tend to have either off flavors or turn mushy quickly when attempting to integrate them into anything complex.
Canned fruits
Start with basic fruits like applesauce, peaches and pineapple. Stick with items that have no added sugar (even sugar substitutes) or are canned in fruit juice only.
Choose what you plan to use, and store amounts based on that. Some canned fruits have a shorter shelf life than others, so look at your usage and don’t over stock.
Canned Meats
This category is not easy to stock and stick with clean ingredients. Many canned meats add all kinds of fillers, stabilizers, and flavorings to the process. But it is possible to find clean versions of some of the meats and stock those.
We started with tuna and canned chicken. Make sure whatever you are stocking are items you can use. We use tuna and chicken in lunches, so they get a clear rotation on our shelf.
You will want to avoid meats that contain large amounts of salt, as they will be much harder to work with and integrate into other recipes.
Broths & Stocks
Last in the canned goods category for our pantry staples are stocks and broths.
We primarily store chicken and beef stock for hearty full flavor. While broth is an option, some are processed more, or use salt and other additives to stretch the water in the box.
Boxed are our go-to here but canned versions work well too. We try to avoid any paste or dried versions as they typically contain lots of random ingredients or added flavor and color enhancers which are just not needed in our foods.
Be mindful of the salt contents and plan your meals around that amount. If a box of chicken stock contains 40% of your daily needs, and the recipe still calls for more, you might want to cut that down some. Nothing is worse than a pot of salty soup.
Fermented and Long-lasting Foods
Some foods have a long-term or really no shelf expiration. These are good to stock in larger quantities if you can readily use them.
A perfect example of this in our home is vinegar. We use it in not just cooking applications, but for cleaning and laundry. It lasts relatively forever and is easy enough to store. From a cooking standpoint, vinegar is used for flavor and also used in canning.
Fermented foods are another good item to stock. We typically stock sauerkraut. It’s good for the gut, helps with heartburn, and tastes darn good on sausages.
Other options in this area are dried hashbrowns or potato flakes, yeast, and teas. Anything dried tends to last a long time. Similar long lasting wet foods are bottled juices and jams.
Baking & General Cooking Pantry Essentials
I already mentioned yeast above, but most quick breads and biscuits use other leavening methods.
Baking soda, baking powder, cornstarch, cornmeal, and cocoa powder are all something we use at times on our homestead. Bring on the Christmas season, and we typically bake a whole lot more and require more of these essentials during the holidays.
Cornmeal and specialty baking goods have a much shorter shelf life. These should be stocked based on usage, so you don’t end up with rancid items.
Tools
A from-scratch frugal pantry should also include a variety of tools. Just like the wheat grinder, adding tools can help you process whole versions into usable forms.
As an example of useful tools, we have a coffee & spice grinder that we use to grind down large or whole herbs into powders. This is done as we need them in smaller batches, preserving the freshness of the herb or spice until needed, increasing its shelf life.
Think about ways to store common items in whole bulk form and the tools you need to process those into usable versions in your own kitchen.
Take caution when purchasing tools, however.
Many tools have a higher up-front cost. They need to be budgeted and planned for. They also consume space. Weigh out to need and usefulness before you go on a spending spree to buy every kitchen gadget ever made.
Others just flat out won’t produce a good enough version to be worth the cost or have such a high starting cost that you will never recoup the savings.
Stock your pantry staples slowly and intentionally
Changing over to from-scratch cooking takes time. And so does changing over a pantry. Don’t just go and throw out what you have already purchased. That won’t help your food budget.
Start small and convert a section at a time. We started with making dinners from scratch. This led to using up all boxed dinners and replacing those meals with recipes we liked.
With enough meals in our library, we then started adding the key ingredients to make those meals more often without shopping. As we found more and more ingredients overlapping, the stock of those was increased to fit the needs of our family favorites.
Shopping the sales and buying in bulk is critical
In order to build your pantry staples in a budget friendly way, you need to shop the sales. At first this will still look like weekly shopping. Even today, we sometimes still do weekly shopping to hit those good sales.
Planning around the ads on the little things helps to save your budget. Which gives you the budget for buying in bulk.
It always seems very expensive when you try to purchase anything in volume. A large bag of wheat berries could run $50 vs a small bag of flour at $5. Yet when you do the math the price per lb. might be much cheaper. Same goes for meat, and most other bulk staples.
Save up and buy the larger quantity and save in the long run. It won’t feel like it today, but it makes a bit difference in the long run.
You must do the math before you purchase in bulk though. I have seen it many, many times where the large amount is actually more expensive than a small amount. Do the calculator work and make sure the deal is really what it’s cracked up to be.
Only buy what you use
Overstocking creates an enemy that you alone will have to slay. And it will take a big bite out of your food budget in the meantime.
Most food items expire. And it’s not always safe to ignore an expiration date. If you stock too much of an item, you increase the chances of it going bad. Starting small allows you to build up based on the things you use the most, rather than what you think you will use.
Buy food you actually eat
I don’t care how little you pay for something, if you never eat it then you might as well have burned that money in the fireplace. At least then it might have warmed your house.
Buy only items you plan to eat or have meals that you can use it in. No matter how good the sale is, you can’t get money back when it goes bad a year or two from now.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still okay to try new things. And it’s still fine to buy a spice for a single meal to see if you like it. Set aside a part of your budget to experiments and know that part might not be useful in the end.
Rotating stock
Our biggest success was to stop trying to control every aspect of our pantry and stop tracking every grain of rice.
Instead of making a complex spreadsheet, we found that a simple number of desired items worked way better. Here is how this works:
- We start with 24 cans of corn.
- Over the month we use 8 cans.
- As the next month comes around, we shop for another 8 cans.
- These new 8 cans get placed in the back, pushing all remaining cans forward.
- To help with kids and accidental out of order use, all cans are numbered using a marker as 1-24, with the new cans just continuing the count onwards or looping as needed.
Building a frugal pantry that serves your lifestyle
Your pantry and my pantry will not be the same. No matter how much I tell you to purchase, you need to do what works for your family. There is no perfect pantry setup or solution.
To channel Po in ‘Kung Foo Panda’, there is no secret ingredient!
In this season of our life, we have five kids running around. That requires more food on the shelf. If you only have three young kids, you probably won’t need as much food.
The same applies for preparedness. If my family chooses to stock up enough supplies for 6 months, that might not fit with your needs. Maybe you want a year, or a month.
You also have to factor what space you have to put your pantry essentials. If your house only has a few cupboards, maybe a bedroom closet will need to be emptied and used. Our current house has little space in the kitchen. Instead, we have shelves lining a hallway and our pantry continues down the hall. The idea is to create a system that is easy enough for your family, sustainable over the long term and one that everyone in your house can confidently use.
