Store cupboard build: 7, 14 and 30 days
Most stock-up lists are a wall of tins. This one is built the other way round: work out what you will cook, then buy the things those dishes need. The difference shows up around day four, when the wall-of-tins version has become nine variations on beans and the other has not.
Three rules make the whole thing work.
Buy for meals, not for calories. A tin of beans is not dinner. A tin of beans plus tomatoes, smoked paprika, cumin, oil and something acidic is dinner. The second category weighs almost nothing and costs a few pounds, and it is the entire difference between eating and refuelling.
The flavour list barely grows. Going from seven days to thirty roughly quadruples the bulk and adds almost nothing to the spice kit. Buy it properly once.
Repetition is the real failure mode, and it arrives sooner than people expect. Four bases that behave differently — rice, pasta, couscous, polenta — do more for morale than four more tins of the same thing.
7 days, one or two people
The smallest set that still eats well. Roughly a large shopping bag.
- Bases: pasta 500 g · couscous 500 g · rice 1 kg · red lentils 500 g
- Tins: chopped tomatoes ×4 · chickpeas ×2 · butter beans ×1 · tuna ×2 · sardines ×2 · sweetcorn ×1
- Flavour: olive oil · salt · dried garlic · dried onion · cumin · smoked paprika · chilli flakes · oregano · stock cubes · cider vinegar · bottled lemon juice
- Other: peanut butter · oats · dried apricots · plain flour
Flour is on the list because flatbread takes four minutes in a dry pan and turns several of these dishes from a bowl into a meal.
14 days
Double the bulk, and spend the extra on variety rather than more of the same.
Add: polenta · bulgur · egg noodles · black beans ×2 · cannellini ×2 · passata ×2 · mackerel ×2 · anchovies ×1 · harissa · olives · capers · pickled red cabbage · raisins · honey · milk powder · turmeric.
The anchovies and the harissa are the highest-value additions on that list by a distance. Both are small, both keep, and both make a dish taste like it took longer than it did.
30 days
Now the arithmetic changes. Thirty days of tins is heavy, expensive and genuinely high in sodium — see the note below — so this is the point at which dried goods start to pay.
Add: dried chickpeas · green lentils · split peas · more rice and pasta · more tomatoes · sauerkraut · tinned peaches · tinned potatoes.
Dried pulses are where the saving is, and they come with a water cost and a soaking method that is not the one most people know — see rehydrating dried pulses before you commit to them for a month. Lentils and split peas need no soak at all, which makes them the easiest place to start.
Two things to watch at this length:
Sodium. Tinned food is salty and it accumulates. Draining and rinsing tinned pulses removes a worthwhile amount. Cooking from dried removes nearly all of it.
Vitamin C. The genuine gap in a long-life diet. Sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, tinned tomatoes and dried fruit are in the list deliberately rather than incidentally.
What not to buy
Anything you have not cooked before. A stock-up is the worst moment to discover you dislike something, and an untried ingredient bought in quantity tends to still be there a year later.
Dried kidney beans, unless you have read the page about them. They are cheap and excellent and they have a hard rule attached that a slow-cooker habit will break.
More tins than you will rotate. See rotation and FIFO. A cupboard you cannot see into is a cupboard that quietly expires.