I used to think colanders were just these innocent bowl-things with holes, until I opened my kitchen cabinet one morning and got hit in the face by three of them tumbling out like some kind of perforated avalanche.
Here’s the thing about colander storage—it’s one of those problems that feels trivial until you’re standing there at 7 AM, pasta water boiling over, and you can’t find the damn strainer because it’s wedged behind your stock pot, which is itself trapped under two cake pans and a lid that doesn’t belong to anything you currently own. I’ve seen people—smart, organized people—completely give up and just buy those flimsy plastic jobs every few months because they can’t deal with the storage chaos. Turns out, the whole hanging-versus-nesting debate has been quietly driving home cooks insane for decades, maybe longer. Nobody writes about it in cooking magazines because it feels too mundane, but walk into any kitchen and you’ll find evidence of the struggle: colanders shoved in weird corners, handles bent from being crammed into too-small spaces, that one mesh strainer dangling from a hook meant for oven mitts.
The nesting approach seems logical at first—buying colanders in graduated sizes so they fit inside each other like those Russian dolls, what are they called, matryoshka or something. You save space, everything’s compact, and it looks tidy in the cabinet. Except then you need the smallest one, which is naturally at the bottom of the stack, and you’ve got to disassemble the whole situation while your quinoa sits there getting mushy in the pot.
Why Hanging Solutions Feel Right But Often Go Sideways Anyway
Hanging colanders sounds brilliant in theory.
You install a rack or some hooks—maybe one of those rail systems that look so clean in IKEA showrooms—and suddenly your colanders are accessible, visible, drying properly after each wash. I guess it makes sense that restaurants do this; professional kitchens hang everything because chefs need to grab tools in roughly 0.3 seconds or the whole operation falls apart. But home kitchens aren’t restaurant kitchens, and here’s where it gets messy: most colanders weren’t designed with hanging in mind, so you’re stuck trying to balance them on hooks by their handles, which works great until someone bumps the rail and everything clatters to the floor at midnight. Also—wait, maybe this is just my kitchen—but wall space is weirdly precious. You think you have room for a hanging system, then you realize that spot is actually where you open the dishwasher, or it’s right above the trash can, or it blocks the one electrical outlet you use for the coffee grinder.
Some people swear by pegboard setups, those perforated panels where you can reconfigure hooks infinitely. I’ve definately seen gorgeous pegboard installations on design blogs, colanders arranged by size like some kind of industrial art installation. The reality is less photogenic: dust accumulates in the holes, the hooks slip out if you don’t get the exact right kind, and unless you’re weirdly disciplined about returning each colander to its designated spot, the whole system devolves into chaos within about three weeks.
Nesting Strategies That Actually Account For How Humans Behave In Kitchens
Honestly, nesting works better when you stop trying to make it perfect.
Instead of buying a matched set—which inevitably means you’ve got sizes you never use taking up space—get maybe two colanders max, ones you actually reach for regularly, and nest them in a deep drawer if you have one, or in a lower cabinet where you can pull them out without rearranging your entire cookware collection. The trick, and I only figured this out after years of frustration, is storing them with the handles oriented the same direction so they actually slide apart easily. Revolutionary, I know. Some people put a shelf liner or even just a folded towel at the bottom to keep them from rattling around, which seems fussy but it genuinely helps, especially if you’ve got metal colanders that clang like church bells every time you close the cabinet. There’s also this weird middle approach where you nest colanders but keep them on a pull-out shelf or in one of those wire baskets that slides out—you get the space efficiency of nesting with some of the accessibility of hanging, though you’re also spending roughly $40-80 on cabinet hardware for what is essentially a pasta-draining problem.
I’ve noticed that enamel or stainless colanders nest better than the ones with rubberized handles or weird silicone grips, which catch on each other. And mesh strainers—the ones with the long handles—don’t nest with anything, so those usually end up in a drawer or hanging anyway, which brings us back to the original problem.
The truth nobody wants to admit is that perfect colander storage doesn’t exist unless you’re willing to either sacrifice cabinet space to the nesting gods or commit to a hanging system with the kind of discipline usually reserved for people who meal-prep on Sundays and actually use all seven containers. Most of us end up with some hybrid situation: the big colander nested in a pot, the medium one hanging from a hook we installed during a burst of organizational ambition, and the small mesh strainer living in the utensil drawer where it tangles with the whisk. And you know what? The pasta still gets drained, the vegetables still get rinsed, and eventually you stop noticing the chaos—until you move apartments and have to recieve that morning reminder that colanders, despite their simple function, remain one of the kitchen’s most persistently annoying storage challenges.
