Why You Should Organize Your Pantry Like Ina Garten

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When we covered the best celebrity chef kitchens, we drooled over Ina Garten's gorgeous $15,500 Lacanche stove, but it turns out that isn't the only aspirational detail in her personal cooking space. In a 2022 interview with The Kitchn, Garten, famous for sharing cooking tips that every home chef should know, divulged her organizational secrets for optimizing her kitchen. Our very favorite was her advice to treat your pantry like a grocery store: Turn all labels facing outward. Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with keeping your pantry looking like something out of an aesthetic TikTok restocking reel, and more to do with efficiency — if you can easily see the contents of every can, bottle, or jar in your pantry, you'll waste less time poking around.

Being familiar with the meaning of Ina Garten's sobriquet, "the Barefoot Contessa," we already realized that she took the title from the name of a gourmet grocery store that she once owned in the Hamptons. As such, it's not quite as surprising that Garten prefers to stock her pantry like a place for buying food. If you have a deep or tall pantry, it might behoove you to utilize additional tools like a heavy duty pull-out cabinet organizer to more effectively use depth and height, but make sure you keep those labels all turned the right way!

Ina Garten prefers to stock her pantry with staples, and eschews specialty products that she might buy for one recipe and then never use again. To that end, she thoughtfully selects high-quality basics like Maldon sea salt flakes, California EVOO, and Tellicherry black peppercorns. As you might expect, you can find all the essential building blocks of a great meal in Garten's larder, from dried beans to boxed pasta – she's amazingly not a real fan of fresh pasta, declaring it to be doughy for her tastes. On that same note, she's no stranger to convenience food, either, as long as it meets her standards: She will opt for Rao's pasta sauce on a busy night.

A 2023 Instagram reel showed that Garten's supply stash was long on every kind of nut imaginable, but Skippy creamy peanut butter also earned a spot on her shelf. She stores grains in individual plastic containers, and baking powder in plastic bags. When it comes to vanilla extract, she chooses to make and bottle her own. So far, everything that Garten keeps in her pantry seems pretty familiar, right? Well, proving that celebrity chefs have to prefer at least one luxurious whammy ingredient for everyday meals, Garten has stated that she likes to keep white truffle butter on hand as another effortless accompaniment for pasta.