The heat from the stove can ruin this kitchen staple. Yikes!
You Should Never Store This Kitchen Item Next to the Stove
Published on Apr. 29, 2025
Kitchens have so many rules. Don’t preheat pots and pans incorrectly. Don’t let your knives get too dull. Don’t use the same towel for dishes and your hands!
There are even rules about where to store specific ingredients. It turns out that many of us have been keeping our cooking oil in the wrong spot.
What shouldn’t be stored by the stove?
You shouldn’t store olive oil next to the stove, which is bad news for many (if not most) of us. Keeping your olive oil on the countertop next to the stove makes sense, right? You want it handy to drizzle over preheated pans, and the tall bottles can be difficult to fit in cabinets.
However, olive oil and virtually every other cooking oil can degrade in quality when exposed to heat.
The North American Olive Oil Association says there are “four enemies of olive oil:” heat, oxygen, light and age. While many conventional olive oils have airtight caps to prevent oxidation, and their dark-green tinted bottles (or opaque tins) prevent too much light exposure, heat can penetrate virtually any packaging and cause the oil to go bad.
Rancid olive oil might be cloudy, greasy, and/or smelly—nothing you want to add to your next meal.
Where should you store olive oil?
The same place you store a lot of other staples: in a cool, dark place. In your kitchen, this might mean a cabinet, cupboard or pantry, or simply a shady, recessed area of the countertop, well away from heat sources. (That includes the warm motor of your refrigerator.) It might be slightly inconvenient to transfer olive oil to the stove while cooking, but the reward will be a tastier, longer-lasting product.
In addition to olive oil, there are all kinds of things you shouldn’t store on the countertop. Lack of kitchen counter space is a common complaint, so clear those items off the surface to free up some valuable real estate.
Related:
