Ingredient

Tomato paste Recipes

53 recipes with tomato paste for weeknights, meal prep, and quick ingredient searches. Choose by time, cuisine, and what is in your kitchen.

53 recipes

🇺🇸USAAdvanced

Soups

Beef and Vegetable Soup

Cheap, tough beef cuts braised low and slow in broth with root vegetables until the meat is tender enough to break with a spoon. The collagen from those cuts dissolves into the broth over time and makes it thick and glossy. Expensive steaks make thin, bland soup.

120 min380 kcal6 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Sausage and Pea Pasta

Italian pork sausages browned until the fat renders and the casing crisps, then simmered in a quick tomato-cream sauce with peas and finished with parmesan. This is the kind of pasta that feels like a restaurant dish but comes together in under 30 minutes on a weeknight. Rigatoni's ridged tubes hold the sauce inside and out — every forkful pulls a bit of everything.

30 min690 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

🇺🇸USAMedium

Meat Dishes

Ground Beef and Potato Skillet

Ground beef and potatoes in one pan, done in 35 minutes. No advance prep, no separate boiling. The beef goes in first and builds a fond on the bottom of the pan; the potatoes cook in that flavoured fat with a splash of broth and a lid on top. It's the kind of meal that doesn't ask much of you on a weeknight.

35 min430 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

🇮🇳IndiaAdvanced

Vegetable and Mushroom Dishes

Chickpea and Spinach Curry

Two cans of chickpeas, a bag of spinach, tomatoes, coconut milk, and a handful of spices. One pan, 35 minutes. The kind of meal that costs almost nothing, reheats perfectly, and somehow gets better the next day. The spice list looks long but everything on it is standard pantry — once you have them, this recipe costs next to nothing per portion.

35 min340 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free

🇺🇸USAMedium

Meat Dishes

Hot Honey Bowl

Roasted sweet potato, taco-seasoned ground turkey, cottage cheese, avocado, and a generous drizzle of hot honey. A bowl that sounds questionable until you try it. Cold cottage cheese against warm sweet potato and meat, the sweet heat of the honey on top — it works in a way that is hard to explain before the first bite. One of the most shared high-protein meals on TikTok for a reason.

35 min520 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

🇺🇸USAMedium

Meat Dishes

Cottage Cheese Taco Bowl

Taco-spiced ground turkey, roasted sweet potato cubes, cottage cheese, avocado, and kimchi or pickled red onion. The kimchi is not optional if you want the bowl to work — the acid cuts through the fat and sweetness and pulls everything together.

35 min510 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

🇺🇸USAAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Tex-Mex Cottage Cheese Bowl

Taco-seasoned ground beef or turkey, roasted sweet potato, black beans, cottage cheese, avocado, salsa, and hot honey. The black beans are not decoration — they add serious fiber and protein while absorbing the taco-spiced meat juices. This bowl keeps you full longer than most.

35 min520 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Penne alla Vodka

Penne in a creamy tomato sauce with pancetta, vodka, and a hit of chilli. The sauce is the color of a sunset — somewhere between deep red and pale pink — and the texture is what happens when heavy cream meets a reduced tomato base: thick, glossy, and rich enough that the pasta takes on its own weight. Penne alla vodka became a cult dish in Italy in the 1980s and hit American restaurant menus shortly after. Its origins are genuinely disputed between Rome, Bologna, and New York. What nobody disputes is that it works: the vodka doesn't add alcohol flavor (it mostly cooks off) but it unlocks aroma compounds in the tomato that neither water nor oil can dissolve, making the sauce smell and taste more intensely of tomato than a standard tomato cream sauce.

30 min620 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Pasta alla Puttanesca

A bold, briny Neapolitan pasta sauce built entirely from pantry staples: anchovies, olives, capers, garlic, and canned tomatoes. The name translates roughly as 'in the manner of a prostitute' — the exact origin is disputed but the dish is genuinely Neapolitan, from the Spanish Quarter, and dates to at least the mid-20th century. What makes it work is the combination of four distinct salty elements — the anchovy dissolves into the oil, the capers add a floral brine, the olives add a fruity richness, the tomato provides acidity — and none of them taste quite right alone, but together they produce something complex and deeply savory in under twenty minutes. Do not worry about the anchovies: they disappear completely into the oil and leave no fishy taste. Only their umami remains.

25 min490 kcal4 serves

⚡Quick🌶️Spicy

🇮🇹ItalyMedium

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Lentil Bolognese

Red lentils simmered with soffritto, tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, and red wine into a thick, deeply savory pasta sauce. No meat, no substitutes — just lentils doing what they do best when you give them enough time and heat. The sauce works because red lentils dissolve into the tomato base, thickening it while adding body and protein. Walnuts, added near the end, give the sauce a slight richness and something to chew on. The whole thing takes about 40 minutes and tastes better the next day.

45 min480 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free

🇲🇽MexicoMedium

Appetizers and Sandwiches

Jackfruit Tacos

Canned young green jackfruit pulled apart, spiced with cumin, smoked paprika, chipotle, and oregano, then seared in a hot pan until the edges brown and the filling gets sticky. Served in warm corn tortillas with avocado crema, quick-pickled red onions, cilantro, and lime. Jackfruit works here because of its fibrous texture — shredded, it genuinely resembles pulled pork or chicken, and it absorbs whatever flavor you cook it with. The key is buying the right can: young green jackfruit in brine or water, not the ripe sweet fruit packed in syrup. Everything else follows from that.

30 min390 kcal4 serves

🌱Vegan🌿Vegetarian🌾Gluten-free

🇬🇧UKAdvanced

Vegetable and Mushroom Dishes

Vegan Shepherd's Pie

A savory lentil, mushroom, and vegetable filling in a herb-thickened gravy, topped with smooth, buttery mashed potato and baked until the surface is golden and slightly crisp. This is the kind of dish that makes people forget it's vegan — the filling has the depth and weight of a meat braise because of how the tomato paste, mushrooms, and herbs are cooked together, and the potato topping behaves exactly like the original. Shepherd's pie takes time but most of it is hands-off. The filling can be made days ahead. The assembled unbaked pie keeps in the fridge for two days before it goes in the oven.

70 min420 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan

Ingredients

Goes well with

Other ingredients that appear most often alongside tomato paste across the archive. Pick one to drill deeper.

garlic tomato onion carrot ground beef beef potato tomatoes eggplant ginger ricotta mozzarella