Create Stunning Kitchen Storage For Potatoes And Onions With An Ikea Hack

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As some of the most versatile pantry staples out there, you can pretty much count on using potatoes, onions, and garlic in your meal prep nearly every week. And since all three keep well even when unrefrigerated, it's sometimes nice to stock up on them all at once; that way you don't find yourself onion-less when you're trying to put together a cozy fall soup. But at the risk of filling your whole fruit bowl with bulbs of garlic, it can be tough to find a good, aesthetically pleasing storage solution for these kinds of items. One content creator's solution? Combine Ikea cabinets with wire mesh and windowed drawer fronts for an elegant, built-in storage solution that will keep these items fresh and accessible in a totally cottagecore way.

Essentially, @ashbrockinton's idea, shared on Instagram, involves creating dedicated potato, onion, and garlic drawers. She specifically used Ikea's $164 white Sektion cabinet base with built-in wire baskets built into a kitchen island to keep the storage tucked out of the way, but replaced the door with drawer fronts with mesh windows. The mesh allows air to circulate so that your onions and potatoes don't rot, while still being spaced tightly enough that bulbs of garlic can't fall through. You can also customize this with existing cabinetry by using rectangular wire baskets (like these ones from Beimu on Amazon) and stacking them on drawer tracks (like these soft-close mounts from Vagude on Amazon) inside a cabinet base.

This content creator chose to use three wire drawers to separate her items, but if you don't have quite that much space, you can always stick to just one or two drawers and combine items. That said, whether you're storing produce in kitchen drawers or in the fridge, you should make sure to separate your onions and potatoes — the ethylene gas onions produce can cause your potatoes to sprout eyes earlier, and the moisture of a potato can make your onions mushy.

The original version of the hack, while very elegant, is definitely a pretty involved DIY, and it could easily get pretty pricey as well. But at its core, using a mesh basket to store root veggies in a way that lets in air to keep them fresh is a simple idea, and it can certainly be modified to fit your needs and kitchen space limitations. 

If you don't have a kitchen island, you could take the door off of an unused cabinet and install rolling tracks for your wire baskets there. If you don't have cabinet space, but you have countertop space, you could use just one of Ikea's wire baskets to keep your items contained and separate from your fruit bowl storage. And if space is slim for both of those areas, you could even try hanging a couple of wire basket drawers from the wall, either in your kitchen or in your pantry space to take advantage of an often underutilized area. And if trying to find a space for the basket at all is a challenge, maybe pick up some other Ikea items to organize your kitchen further and clear up some extra space for storage.

Having this kind of storage is good for any home cook, but it's especially useful if you're starting a beginner's vegetable garden and expecting an influx of homegrown alliums or potatoes. If that's you, after you've successfully created a place to stockpile your harvest for the winter months, you may slowly realize that you have rather a surplus of onions. Our solution to making use of your new veritable treasure trove of aromatic produce? Making the best French onion soup with earthy, homegrown yellow onions.