My Store Cupboard: Ingredients Always in My Basket
by Nicola Lando
There are some ingredients that I order all the time, and never last for long in our house...
The family's favourite Italian egg-dried pasta; olives that always vanish before dinner; the coffee beans we grind every morning - there's a list of regulars I re-order every month.
With that in mind, we've created our NEW Store Cupboard Fillers collection, to make it easier to build a really well-stocked cupboard, that reflects what you need most day in, day out.
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.
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, tfhey become pomodoro 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 sweetness of 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 flavour stays wonderfully fresh.
A jar of tomato sauce that tastes homemade
I always keep four to six jars of La Favorita tomato sauce in the cupboard. Not because I’m avoiding cooking, but because some evenings it's nice to do close to no washing up! The jar is so small and concentrated you can stir a full jar of cold sauce through the pan of hot pasta, and it's still a good temperature for eating -- particularly with kids!
One jar serves two very generously, or four with a lighter amount of sauce. The flavour is rich, sweet and deeply tomatoey in the way only good Italian tomato sauces seem to manage. It’s one of the jars I always replace before I’ve finished the last one.
Pesto that’s changed how I use pesto
The La Favorita pesto made it impossible for me to go back to supermarket versions. Most pestos in a jar are either heat-treated or have preservatives to make them keep -- yet the clever producers at La Favorita have made this jar shelf-stable without any adulteration. It tastes much 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 open, it rarely stays in the fridge for long.
Aleppo pepper is the spice I reach for daily
Some spices need a plan, but Aleppo pepper (pul biber) isn’t one of them. It has warmth without overwhelming heat, and I reach for it over roast vegetables, hummus and grilled chicken. Or even for a gentle heat (like last night's dinner) fried in the oil in pasta puttanesca. My favourite is to fry it in a little butter, Turkish style, before drizzling the rich red spice over eggs.
One jar lasts ages. And I miss it almost immediately if I’ve run out.
Tinned sardines make one of my favourite lunches
There are always tins of sardines stacked high 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 and chives, and crush together with the sardines and a spoonful of mayonnaise or yoghurt, and heap on toasted sourdough. One of those lunches where you wonder why you don't have it every day...
Also fabulous in simple spaghetti with lemon juice and parsley.
Don't forget they are rich in Omega 3 fats, that in the UK, we're perilously low on eating. Tinned sardines really are a store cupboard hero.
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. And with a jar that beautiful, it's welcome to take up shelf space!
It finds its way into salad dressings, sauces, sandwiches and anything involving sausages.
Every kitchen needs dependable mustard. This - along with a nice smooth Dijon mustard - 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 Italian 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 from Taiwan have become a family favourite. The texture is what makes these so brilliant - they’re satisfyingly chewy in a way that most noodles never quite are.
Quite often I’ll toss them them with nothing more than soy sauce and sesame oil after cooking. The simplest bowls are the ones everyone asks for again and again.
Pasta I always replenish
We get through an astonishing amount of pasta at home. Pastificio Morelli 'pasta with germ' is always somewhere in the cupboard.
They add fresh wheat germ back to the semolina flour during kneading. That gives the pasta a fantastic flavour and a little more character - without becoming 'wholewheat' tasting - so is still a treat. But their main reason is to increase levels of protein, minerals, and Vitamins D and E making the pasta more nutritious.
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 Kalios Kalamata 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.
Buy any 10 bestsellers from our Store Cupboard Fillers collection, enjoy 10% off your order.
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.
I've also discovered if I use it in hummous instead of lemon juice (when I once ran out of lemons but still had yuzu in the fridge...), you get a characterful recipe people rave about - but somehow without tasting 'fusion'. Cocktails too. A great stand by!
Rice that makes dinner feel different
I always keep several grains in the cupboard. It's good for us to have that variety, plus the coloured rices are higher in fibre. And changing the grain often changes the whole meal. It’s an easy way of making dinner feel new without creating a 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 Lando is the co-founder and CEO of Sous Chef, where she has spent more than a decade sourcing, tasting and selecting specialist ingredients, cookware and tableware from producers around the world.
She trained at Leiths and later completed a stage at a Michelin-starred London restaurant, experiences that helped shape Sous Chef’s original mission: to give home cooks access to the same exceptional ingredients used by professional chefs.
Today, Nicola leads much of Sous Chef’s product sourcing and ingredient selection, working directly with producers and travelling internationally to food fairs, farms, mills and manufacturers. She tastes thousands of products each year and has built deep expertise across storecupboard ingredients, olive oil, condiments, spices, preserved foods and specialist cooking ingredients.
She holds an olive oil sommelier certification from ESAO in Spain, Imperial Executive Education’s Certificate in Nutrition for Health: Evidence-Based Tools and Strategies certificate; as well as studying Food Safety and Control at University of Greenwich.
Nicola also writes recipes and ingredient guides for Sous Chef, combining practical cooking experience with first-hand knowledge from producers, suppliers and specialist food makers. Her work focuses on helping cooks understand how to choose better ingredients, use them well, and get more flavour from their cooking.
