Pantry staples list: 44 ingredients for easy weeknight dinners

このページは、今のところ英語のみです。

A pantry staples list should be short and a little boring: a couple of fats, a couple of acids, onions and garlic, rice, canned tomatoes and beans, a carton of broth, a handful of spices, three or four sauces, eggs, and a few things in the freezer. That is forty-odd items, not a hundred.

We can be specific because we checked. Across the 148 dinners in the Tonight catalog, cooks need 209 different ingredients. But the 20 most used ones account for 46% of every ingredient listing, and with the 44 staples below on your shelves, the median dinner needs just four more things from the store.

Fat, acid and onions come first

Almost every dinner opens with fat: 132 of our 148 recipes list a cooking fat, and olive oil alone is in 71. Acid finishes the job. Lemon or lime turns up in 55 recipes, and it is the cheapest fix for a dish that tastes flat. A bottle of vinegar or two covers the rest.

The alliums are the real foundation. Onion is in 51% of our recipes, and at least one of onion, garlic, ginger, scallion, shallot or leek is in 121 of the 148. Carrots and potatoes make the short list of vegetables that live happily in a cool cupboard or crisper for a week or two, ready to bulk out whatever is on the stove.

The shelf: grains, cans and spices

Rice is the workhorse

If your instinct says spaghetti, our catalog says rice. Rice is in 48 of our dinners, about one in three, and couscous, bulgur, quinoa, barley, farro or polenta is in 20 more. Dried pasta shows up in only 7. Buy the grains you will cook weekly and store them dry.

Cans and cartons save a Tuesday

Broth is in 56 of our recipes, a canned tomato product in 43, and beans, chickpeas or lentils in 27. Keep two cans of tomatoes, a tube or can of tomato paste, chickpeas, black beans, coconut milk and a carton or two of broth, and you can build a stew, a curry or a soup from nothing. Once a can is open, move the rest to a covered container in the refrigerator and use it within a few days.

Seven spices are enough to start

Spice racks accrete. Seven jars, cumin, paprika, oregano, thyme, chili powder, curry powder and sesame seed, cover 71 of our 148 dinners between them, with cumin alone in 20. The long tail is real but thin: ras el hanout and garam masala turn up in five recipes each, and many more spices in one or two. Buy those when a recipe asks.

Sauces, and the cold shelves

Sauces do the seasoning

Soy sauce is in 26 of our recipes, and one of soy sauce, fish sauce, mirin, gochujang, hoisin, oyster sauce, teriyaki or miso is in 36. Dijon mustard is in 11. These are salty, sour and savory in one bottle, which is why a spoonful can rescue a pot. Mirin, fish sauce and gochujang (9, 9 and 8 recipes) are more specialized. If Japanese, Korean or Thai dinners are a weekly habit, they earn a spot. Otherwise buy them the week a recipe asks.

The refrigerator and freezer

Eggs are in 17 of our recipes, parmesan in 9 and feta in 10. In the freezer, shrimp appear in 13 recipes and salmon in 12, which makes a bag of each a solid fallback. Keep the freezer at 0°F (-18°C) so they keep their quality.

What you will still buy every week

The four most common ingredients that did not make the list are all fresh: parsley (29 recipes), scallion (21), spinach (17) and cilantro (16). Herbs and greens are meant to be bought close to when you cook. Texas A&M's guidance is to keep parsley with its stems in water under a loose plastic wrap, which gets it 2 to 4 weeks, and green onions in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, where they last about 5 days.

A caveat about this list

It leans on the catalog it comes from. Our 148 dinners span 18 cuisines, with American (14), Mexican and Japanese (13 each), and Italian, Indian and French (12 each) the biggest groups, so rice, soy sauce, cumin and coconut milk earn their places. If your table eats pasta and cheese most nights, your list will look different. Treat ours as a method: count what your own recipes use, and stock the top of that list.

How long it all keeps

Pantry guidance is about quality, not safety. USDA notes that federal rules don't require product dating, with a few exceptions such as infant formula, that dates are for quality, and that a shelf-stable product can be used safely after its sell-by date. Sources also disagree a little, so treat these as windows.

Buy the first 20, and let dinners tell you the rest

Start with these 20 and add as your cooking asks:

• Fats and acids: olive oil, canola oil, butter, lemon, lime
• Alliums: onion, garlic, ginger
• Grain: white rice
• Cans and cartons: diced tomatoes, tomato paste, chickpeas, chicken broth
• Spices: cumin, paprika, oregano, thyme
• Sauces and eggs: soy sauce, Dijon mustard, eggs

Buy them over a month rather than in one weekend: fats and alliums first, then grain and cans, then spices and sauces. You will find out what you actually use, and nothing sits long enough to go stale.

With those 20 alone, the median Tonight dinner needs five more ingredients, and 93 of our 148 dinners need five or fewer. The other 24 items pull the median to four and lift the count of dinners needing four or fewer from 42 to 113. The first 20 do most of the work.

Here is what the full shelf buys you. With all 44 in place, 27 of our 148 dinners need two or fewer extra ingredients, and four need just one. The ginger-soy salmon with broccoli rice needs only the broccoli. The chickpea and spinach coconut curry needs spinach and a bottle of vegetable oil. Counts leave out optional ingredients, salt, pepper and water.

There is also a skip list. Of the 209 ingredients in our catalog, 61 appear in exactly one recipe, and 97 in two or fewer. Hoisin sauce, for example, is in one. Buy those by the recipe and not by the shelf, and the pantry stays a pantry instead of a museum.

This is how Tonight treats staples, too. Mark yours once and they're assumed to be at home, so they don't clutter your shopping list, which is the week's dinners minus what you have, in real pack sizes and sorted by aisle. Use what you have covers that in more detail. If you'd rather not build the list by hand, Tonight is free to try for 7 days.

A stocked shelf also makes the fast dinners possible: see weeknight dinner ideas for the ones that really take 30 minutes, the sheet pan dinners guide for what to do with those oils and spices, and freezer-friendly dinners for the batch-cooking side. You can browse every dish in the recipe library.