Organizing your kitchen will make cooking FAR more enjoyable!

The two times I worked in restaurant kitchens, it was made pretty clear right from the beginning that things must always be put back in very specific places. If they weren’t, the offending party heard about it immediately. And if it was Chef doing the talking (yelling), it was guaranteed to be an unpleasant experience!

Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to organize our kitchen for efficiency. That only requires some thought on what should go where (and why), but then comes the real trick: making sure everyone understands this and puts things back where they belong. No excuses accepted and no quarter given!

Now that’s not to say I’m a martinet about kitchen organization, but I’m also not afraid to tell my wife or anyone else that if they use something, “Please put it back exactly where you found it.” And I do mean exactly! Since I do most of the cooking around here, it’s recognized that I call the shots.

The obvious reason for this level of organization is so that the person who’s cooking doesn’t have to waste any time finding the utensils, cooking vessels, or appliances that they need. I’m sure you feel the same way I do about this: there is nothing that frustrates a cook more than to not be able to find what they need and having to waste time looking for it.

Another benefit of organizing a kitchen to a high level is that you can fit more into it. That can be by necessity if your kitchen is a small one, but it can also make a huge difference in a large kitchen. One step into a restaurant or other kind of commercial kitchen will show you why. The goal is to not only turn out delicious food, but to turn it out as quickly as possible. If you have to cross the room for commonly used things, then you’re wasting precious time, even if it only takes five or ten seconds. During the course of an evening rush, those seconds quickly turn into minutes.

Okay. So now you know my reasons for organizing my workspace. What is it that I did, exactly?

The first thing I did broke the cardinal rule I gave two paragraphs above (at least a little bit): keeping things you use a lot close to you. But in this case, it wound up saving more time.

We have a counter top gas cooktop against the west wall of our kitchen. The oven is close by on the south wall (basically you turn left and take one step to get there). To the left of the oven is our refrigerator. Our sink is directly across from the oven against the north wall, and about the same distance away. On both side of the cooktop are counters, extending from one thing to another. That’s my “general working area” (and the classic “triangle” set-up of a well laid-out kitchen). To the right of the sink is another counter extending over to our back door. The dish washer is under this. The remaining side of the kitchen has two sets of stairs: one down to the basement and the other up to our bedroom. Along the down stairs (and acting as a railing is a low well to which is mounted our last counter, an 8-foot length we use for plating when we make a large meal or for serving buffet-style meals. I’ll get into the cupboard arrangement later.

Underneath the stove are two deep drawers. We used to store as many of our pots and pans as would fit in there, along with their lids. This caused two problems. First, we have invested in good cookware and good cookware is heavy. You can guess at the problems we had with the bottoms of these drawers. second, with the number of pots, frypans, skillets, etc. that we own, you’d have to sift through stacks of things to find what you might need right now.

So my first organizing move (and the one that broke the rule) was something you see in commercial kitchens: hanging pots and pans from a bar mounted to the ceiling. Our kitchen’s ceiling is just eight feet, so hanging these things above my general working area would not have worked. The ideal place to hang the bar was directly above our “staging counter”, which is farther away from the stove. We got one of those heavy duty bars that hangs by means of chains from two large hooks screwed into a conveniently-placed ceiling joist. So someone cooking needs to walk about three steps to the far side of the room to retrieve a pot. Takes a tad longer, right? Well, it does, but it takes far more time to go through the drawers where these things used to reside. Now that’s a good trade to my mind.

Once we moved the pots and pans, we dedicated the top drawer under the stove to lids, two cast iron skillets that wouldn’t fit on the bar and our pressure cooker that couldn’t hang from the bar. The lower drawer (among other things) fits some small appliances (juicer, coffee mill, etc, some of our large kitchen tools that won’t fit in drawers and our wok.

This post has gone on long enough for a beginning, but I hope it gives you some starting places for improving your own kitchen’s layout. Trust me when I write that organizing your kitchen into an efficient “factory” for producing food will cut way down on the aggravation factor that many have endure when faced with cooking a meal in an inefficient space. Since I really became a nut about organizing where I spend a lot of time, my enjoyment of cooking something, even a complicated dish, has gone way up.

Next post, I’ll talk about organizing our cupboards and drawers for our staple items and (many, many) utensils.