My Store Cupboard: Ingredients Always Within Reach
by Nicola Lando
Some people fill their cupboards with “just in case” ingredients. Mine is the opposite. Almost everything in it gets used. A jar disappears because friends came round unexpectedly. A tin of tomatoes becomes Tuesday’s pasta. The olives somehow vanish before dinner is ready.
When we launched our Store Cupboard Fillers, the idea wasn’t simply to make it cheaper to buy more. It was to make it easier to build a cupboard that makes you want to cook. Because once you’ve got a few brilliant ingredients within reach, dinner feels very different. These are the things I almost always have at home. I hope it provides fresh inspiration for your own cupboards.
Buy any 10 bestsellers from our Store Cupboard Fillers collection, enjoy 10% off your order.
Perelló olives. I never buy just one.
If you looked in my kitchen today, you’d probably find six tins of Perelló olives. The small tins disappear surprisingly quickly. One gets opened while someone is cooking. Another goes on the table with drinks. A third somehow empties before anyone admits responsibility.
If we’re having six or eight people over, I’ll buy the 600g tin instead. It saves opening multiple smaller ones, and I know they’ll all get eaten.
They’re one of those ingredients that make people linger around the kitchen.
San Marzano tomatoes are my insurance policy
I don’t think I’ve ever regretted having a few tins of San Marzano tomatoes in the cupboard.
Most often, they become pasta sauce; I gently colour a crushed garlic clove in plenty of olive oil, lift the garlic out, then crush the tomatoes straight into the pan with my hands.
They simmer until the sauce turns glossy and the oil starts to separate. Depending on the harvest, I’ll sometimes add a pinch of sugar alongside the salt. That’s dinner sorted!
They’re also brilliant on pizza. Instead of cooking a sauce first, I simply crush the tomatoes over the base and add the toppings. The tomatoes cook in the oven, and the flavour stays wonderfully fresh.
Buy any 10 bestsellers from our Store Cupboard Fillers collection, enjoy 10% off your order.
A jar of tomato sauce that tastes homemade
I nearly always keep four to six jars of La Favorita tomato sauce in the cupboard.
Not because I’m avoiding cooking, but because some evenings I’d rather spend time talking than standing over the hob.
One jar serves two generously, or four with a few side dishes. The flavour is concentrated, sweet and deeply tomatoey in the way only good Italian tomatoes seem to manage.
It’s one of the jars I quietly replace before I’ve even finished the last one.
Pesto that’s changed how I use pesto
The La Favorita pesto also made it impossible for me to go back to supermarket versions. It isn’t heat-treated, so it tastes much fresher.
Of course it’s lovely stirred through pasta, but I use it just as often in warm lentils, spooned onto grilled vegetables or folded into potato salad. Once it’s open, it rarely stays in the fridge for long.
Aleppo pepper is the spice I reach for most
Some spices feel like they’re waiting for a special occasion, but Aleppo pepper isn’t one of them.
It has warmth without overwhelming heat, and I find myself reaching for it over eggs, roast vegetables, hummus and grilled chicken.
One jar lasts ages. Yet I miss it almost immediately if I’ve run out - and always have a few ready to step in, once a jar ends.
Tinned sardines make one of my favourite lunches
There are always several tins of sardines somewhere in the cupboard. Sometimes they’re simply piled onto hot toast. But if I have another five minutes, I’ll finely chop a shallot or spring onion, maybe half a pepper, mash everything together with the sardines and a spoonful of mayonnaise, and spread it thickly over toasted sourdough. It’s the sort of lunch I never get bored of.
Also fabulous in simple spaghetti with lemon juice and parsley. Sardines really are a store cupboard hero in my house.
One mustard. The right mustard.
Pommery wholegrain mustard isn’t something I buy often - because it doesn’t need to be.
One jar lasts ages in the fridge.
It finds its way into salad dressings, sauces, sandwiches and anything involving sausages.
Every kitchen needs one dependable mustard. This is mine!
Coffee I know I’ll finish
The St Eustachio coffee beans don’t stay in the cupboard for long. I buy one or two kilo bags at a time because we make coffee every day.
It’s one of those purchases where buying ahead simply saves disappointment later. The coffee is delicious - a blend of 100% Arabica, wood roasted coffee beans which is particularly good for making Italian espresso or cappuccino.
The vinegar that changed my salad dressings
Forum Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar is gentler than many wine vinegars because it’s blended with fresh grape must.
That gives it a little sweetness without making it sugary. I use it constantly for lentil salads, leafy salads and simple vinaigrettes. It’s the bottle I reach for without thinking.
The noodles everyone asks for again
Knife-cut noodles have become a family favourite. The texture is what makes these so brilliant - they’re satisfyingly chewy in a way that instant noodles never quite are.
Quite often I’ll cook them with nothing more than soy sauce and sesame oil. Sometimes the simplest bowls are the ones everyone remembers.
Pasta I always replenish
We get through an astonishing amount of pasta at home. Pastificio Morelli is always somewhere in the cupboard.
Their pasta contains wheat germ, which most dried pasta removes during milling before adding it back. It gives the pasta a lovely flavour and a little more character.
Alongside the classics, I like keeping a few of the more unusual shapes and flavours too. Something that nudges us towards cooking something slightly different.
Olives that come with their own dressing
The Kallios Chalkidiki olives deserve a mention alongside the Perelló olives because they’re completely different.
They’re packed in excellent extra virgin olive oil. So the olives disappear first, but then the oil becomes tomorrow’s salad dressing, or the base of a tomato sauce.
Nothing goes to waste.
The bottle that makes salad dressing effortless
Yuzu sauce earns its place in my cupboard because it solves the “what shall I dress this with?” question.
A little yuzu, a little soy sauce, perhaps a drizzle of sesame oil.
That’s often all you need.
Rice that makes dinner feel different
I try to keep more than one grain in the cupboard.
- Sushi rice.
- Black rice.
- Red rice.
Not because every meal has to be elaborate, but because changing the grain often changes the whole meal. It’s an easy way of making dinner feel new without learning an entirely new recipe.
A store cupboard should make you want to cook
I don’t think the perfect pantry exists. Mine changes throughout the year, and yours probably should too.
But I’ve found that if I keep ingredients I genuinely enjoy using, I cook more often, eat better and discover new combinations almost by accident.
That’s really the idea behind our Store Cupboard Fillers. If there are ten things you’ve been meaning to try, now is a good moment to stock the shelves.
Some of them will become your own “I always keep this in the cupboard” ingredients.
And that’s when the fun starts.”
Buy any 10 bestsellers from our Store Cupboard Fillers collection, enjoy 10% off your order.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
