Spice Racks Blog

Suffering from the post-holiday blues? Need a new and exciting project to reinvigorate your outlook? Here’s a great idea that will only take an afternoon, but will enhance the quality of your cooking for the rest of the year: go through your spice rack, and toss all the old bottles.

Spices do indeed have a shelf life, and their quality can greatly decrease as they age (quite unlike us, gentle reader!). A good rule of thumb is to have a yearly purge, and toss out everything that’s about to celebrate its first birthday. And if you happen to have a lot of McCormick spices, their website has a really cool feature! You can actually enter the codes from your bottles to check the freshness! Although, they also say if you have any bottles that were manufactured in Baltimore, don’t bother entering the code – they’re at least 15 years old. The Charm City strikes again!

And after you’ve culled your spices, why not give them a new home? There’s a gorgeous steel, wall mounted Spice Rack at StacksAndStacks right now. This rack has three shelves, and I really like how spice bottles are neatly held in place by the curved metal accents.

So, don’t you think it’s the perfect time to get rid of your old spices?