I too was impressed with Badia. But as I cook for just myself, it seems a shame to buy large containers. No matter how fresh they start out, it’s lost by the time I’m a quarter of the way through the jar. Too bad food pantries don’t take opened containers. The Badia MSG, though, is SO much cheaper than Accent, and seems not to deteriorate.
The insides of cabinet doors offer space for shallow items like dried soup and salad dressing mix packets, cooking utensils, and charts for substitutions, measurement conversions, etc.
I like the stairway pantry! I am in a new house and have not yet brought out my spices from the storage boxes.
I used to take a photo of my spice rack so that if i was at the grocery and saw a special that would need certain spices, i could see if i was stocked up on the right spices.
The stepped up rack let me see my spices, even in the back, sorted alphabetically, with the big containers to the side.
A lot of the Badia herbs and spices are available here in small jars or cellophane bags. (They are a higher price per ounce, of course.) You could always buy the bigger one, discard it when it gets stale, and still come out better per ounce. E.g., 0.5 ounces of oregano is $2.79, and 5.5 ounces is $4.49. Even if you use only an ounce of the big jar it’s cheaper per ounce. But even the small jars are a better deal than McCormick.
And there’s always store brands, other ethnic brands (I buy Pereg cumin in the kosher section), and ethnic grocery stores. And Costco for big jars
And MSG is like salt or sugar–there’s no organic (in the chemical sense) component to go stale.
