The Pantry Primer: Stockpiling the Basics for Scratch Cooking
By Daisy Luther
To be efficient, every pantry requires certain basics that allow for scratch cooking. A good pantry should have everything you need to whip together a pie, a loaf of bread, or a batch of biscuits with no trip to the store required.
Many of these basics can be purchased in large quantities. One of my favorite destinations for pantry basics is Amazon, where I purchase yeast, aluminum-free baking soda, and other building blocks of a scratch pantry. I have also acquired 50-pound bags of organic sugar at Bulk Barn for a reduced price.
What basics do you need?
To build your stockpile, look through your cupboards and see what you use the most. Every kitchen will be different but below are my most-used items – the ones that I search out and buy in bulk.
Baking Items:
- Baking soda
- Baking powder
- Yeast
- Cocoa
- Nonfat dry milk
- Alternative Flours
Fats:
- Olive oil
- Coconut oil
- Shortening
- Butter
- Lard
Sweeteners:
- White sugar
- Turbinado sugar
- Muscavado sugar/brown sugar
- Honey
- Molasses
- Maple syrup
Other:
- Salt
- White vinegar
- Apple cider vinegar
- Balsamic vinegar
- Black pepper
- Herbs and spices
- Cornstarch (please consider organic for all corn products)
Want to learn more? The new edition of The Pantry Primer is now available!
Lots of us like to have hard copies of information that we’ve found helpful. Because of this, I’ve expanded on the information included in this series and put it all in one handy primer, available on Amazon.
The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide to Whole Food on a Half-Price Budget
About the Author
Daisy Luther
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and lives in the mountains of Virginia with her two daughters and an ever-growing menagerie. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.