Better Ways to Organize and Store
Baking Sheets
You may have a pull-out drawer at the bottom of your oven where you
store baking sheets. This is convenient but sometimes it can be a nuisance. If
you have two pizza pans, five different size rectangular cookie sheets and a few
muffin pans, it can be hard to pull an item from the middle of the stack or see
what sizes you have when you're cooking. Tackle this baking sheet organization
and storage problem with a product that you can find in the office supply
sections of stores. It's a sturdy metal desktop vertical sorter.
These vertical desktop sorters are meant
to set on your desk to hold and sort file folders. But you can use the sorter on a kitchen counter
or inside a kitchen closet shelf to hold and sort your flat baking sheets by size.
Some sorters have divided spaces large enough to hold your muffin pans too.
Look for a heavy-duty vertical sorter made of metal with six
to eight slots. You want heavy-duty so that it doesn't get knocked over easily
or tip from the weight of the baking sheets or muffin pans. These sorters usually come in standard
colors like black. If you have lots of baking sheets you can buy two vertical
sorters and set them adjacent to each other.
If you don't have a place in your kitchen closet for this
baking sheet storage method, buy an ordinary freestanding five-shelf shelving
unit and put the sorters on one or two of the shelves. Use the remaining shelves
for other kitchen storage like small appliances, bread boxes or baskets of
vegetables.
Another option is to buy a
Bakeware Organizer
 product made
for this purpose or to buy and use lid organizers for organizing your bakeware--baking
sheets, cookie sheets, and more. (This one is from Organize Everything.) While the concept and product is similar to
using the vertical desktop organizers, there are advantages to using a real bakeware organizer. One is that the dividers are often adjustable so you make
full usage of the organizer and better accommodate larger or slimmer baking pans
or cookie sheets. The other advantage is the real bakeware organizers often come
in white, a much more popular color in many kitchens (you won't find many, if
any, vertical sorters in white--they're usually gray, black or silver to match
common office decor colors).
UPDATE July 2009: Here is the bakeware organizer I
currently use. In fact, I
use two of them side by side on a single open shelf. I found these last year at
Stacks and Stacks and they work perfect to hold my six rectangular cookie sheets
(three per slot), two large round pizza pans (same slot), 12 cupcake pan, a
rectangular and a square baking pan, several small cutting boards and more. It's very sturdy and no one in our
family is throwing their back out anymore trying to bend down to get a pan from
the middle or bottom of a heavy stack of bakeware and cookie sheets below the
oven.
You can get this product or other sizes and variations at this
link:
Sorter and Organizer - Medium That's the Medium size I use. As you can see,
it actually only has four slots (which is why I could fit two side by side on
the shelf perfectly.)
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