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Store All Your Leftovers in

Soup Containers
4-5 minutes

Photo: Kawitsara
Even though my apartment rarely contains more
than two people at a time, I cook as if I’m feeding
a family of four. This is mostly due to my line of
work, but it’s exacerbated by my tendency to
overestimate how much food I can eat at any
given meal. Food storage is therefore critical, and
while I have tried a wide variety of food-storage
systems, none come close to the ease and
efficacy of using soup containers (not deli
containers, which are similarly shaped but
flimsy—soup containers will look slightly more
opaque).

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Ever since I bought two sleeves of soup
containers (in two different sizes) at the
restaurant supply store, I have used little else. I
will occasionally bust out a repurposed jam jar
(for salad dressings, small amounts of sauce,
and emergency cocktails), and I’ve been know to
use a freezer bag here and there, but I would
estimate 90% of my food—leftovers, homemade
condiments, pickles, and dry goods—gets stored
in a plastic soup container. And I’m not the only
one. A.A. Newton (who turned me on to them in
the first place) has sung their praises before:
The buckets come in several sizes, but the lids
are universal. You can put them through the
microwave, dishwasher, and freezer. Empty or

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full, they stack efficiently. Their flexible material

makes them super easy to pour from: just
squeeze the sides gently to make a spout.
They’re recyclable, but they’re so cheap ($5-10
for a sleeve of 50 depending on where you get
them) that tossing a months-old bucket of rotted
mystery fluid straight into the garbage isn’t the
end of the world.
I simply cannot stress how much the stacking
factor matters to me. As I mentioned earlier, my
fridge (and entire kitchen, really) are small, and
containers that stay stably stacked on top of one
another make my life much, much easier. Like
A.A. Newton before me, I take advantage of their
wide-mouth openings to make mayo and other
emulsified dressings right in the container, and
their ability to withstand a broad range of
temperatures means I can fill them with
vegetables and pour boiling pickle brine right on
top, then turn around and pop them in the fridge
or freezer. All that, and they’re transparent, which
means I can actually see the food stored inside,

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making it exponentially more likely I will eat it

before it goes bad. (What do I do if I need to
store something that is larger than a soup
container, like a roasted chicken? I simply leave it
in its roasting pan and cover it with plastic wrap—
but any pan juices go into a soup container.)
Yes, they are plastic, but they are plastic that is
designed to hold food—even very hot food—and
they’re cheap enough that you can toss them into
the recycling the moment you feel they’re
wearing out. They’re pretty durable and, unless
you’re putting them in the microwave on a daily
basis, I’ve found they last a very long time (pretty
much indefinitely if you only use them for cold
and room temperature storage).
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Finally, they are light and virtually unbreakable.
Though I love the look of glass containers, the
good ones are heavy and—no matter how thick
and tempered the glass is—they can shatter if
dropped. The weight of a Pyrex dish may not be

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that big of a deal to some of you, but the

heaviness of kitchen equipment is something I’ve
been thinking about more and more recently,
especially now that my mother is developing
arthritis in her wrists and hands from decades of
as a veterinarian (neutering thousands of animals
really wears on those joints, as it turns out).
Plus, if you have kids, lightweight containers are
a little easier for them to grab and hold than
heavy containers made of glass that they could
drop, break, and potentially cut themselves with. I
don’t have any children, but I imagine they are
always dropping things.
What are your favorite ways to store food? Our
health and science editor, Beth Skwarecki, loves
the square, black, tray-like takeout containers,
especially for meal planning (which I do not really
engage in). Make a case for your container of
choice in the comments below.

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