Ingredient

Tomato paste Recipes

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

48 recipes

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🇮🇳IndiaAdvanced

Vegetable and Mushroom Dishes

Chickpea Tikka Masala

Chickpeas simmered in a creamy, deeply spiced tomato and coconut sauce. The flavor builds in layers: caramelized onion as the base, garlic and fresh ginger for sharpness, bloomed spices for depth, tomato paste cooked until it darkens, then coconut milk pulled in at the end to soften everything into something rich and velvety. This is the version of tikka masala that makes people think vegan food is actually good. It reheats better than almost anything and tastes noticeably better the day after you make it.

40 min420 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free

★4.5

🇺🇸USAMedium

Appetizers and Sandwiches

Black Bean Burger

Black beans mashed to a chunky paste, mixed with sautéed onion and garlic, smoked paprika, cumin, chipotle, oats, and a flax egg, then shaped into patties, chilled until firm, and pan-fried until dark and crisp on the outside. The key textures in a good black bean burger: a proper crust on the outside, and enough whole or partially mashed beans inside to give it a real bite rather than a uniform paste. Two things that determine success: dry the beans before mashing, and don't skip the resting time in the fridge.

45 min380 kcal4 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan🌶️Spicy

★4.4

🇺🇸USAAdvanced

Soups

Vegan Chili

Three kinds of beans and a rich, dark, smoky tomato-based sauce built on chipotle peppers, bloomed spices, and a small amount of cocoa powder. This is the version of vegan chili that wins cook-offs. The cocoa sounds unusual until you taste what it does — it deepens the existing flavors without adding any sweetness or chocolate flavor, the same way it works in a mole. The chipotle gives smoke. The long simmer gives body. A splash of apple cider vinegar at the end lifts everything. Make it the day before if you can.

55 min390 kcal6 serves

🌿Vegetarian🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free

★4.9

🇮🇳IndiaAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Chicken Tikka Masala

Yogurt-marinated chicken thighs grilled until charred, then simmered in a spiced tomato-and-onion sauce with cream. The two-stage process is the point: first the tikka — small pieces of chicken cooked hard over direct heat — then the masala, the spiced sauce they finish in. The char on the chicken is not incidental. It sits in contrast to the cream, and without it you have a decent tomato curry rather than tikka masala. The sauce needs properly browned onion, bloomed spices, and enough cooking time for the tomatoes to lose their sharpness.

65 min490 kcal4 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy💪High protein

★4.6

🇬🇷GreeceAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Moussaka

Three components built and assembled: roasted eggplant, cinnamon-spiced lamb and beef sauce reduced until thick, and a Greek béchamel enriched with egg yolks that sets firm during baking so the slices hold. Moussaka in the form most people know — with that custard-like béchamel top — is a 1920s creation by chef Nikolaos Tselementes, who added a French béchamel to an older layered eggplant dish. The result became the benchmark for Greek home cooking. The work is real but most of it is waiting: the sauce reducing, the eggplant roasting, the assembled dish baking and then resting. The rest time after baking is not optional.

120 min520 kcal6 serves

💪High protein

★4.8

🇬🇷GreeceAdvanced

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Pastitsio

Three layers baked in a deep dish: tubular pasta bound with egg whites, a cinnamon-and-clove spiced beef sauce cooked until very dry, and a thick Greek béchamel enriched with egg yolks that sets firm during baking. Pastitsio is sometimes called Greek lasagna but the comparison only goes so far — the warm spices in the meat sauce give it a depth that Italian ragù does not have, and the Greek béchamel is deliberately thicker and richer than anything on a lasagna. The dish requires time but all three components can be made separately and assembled the same day or the next.

120 min550 kcal6 serves

★4.8

🇮🇹ItalyAdvanced

Soups

Lasagna Soup

All the flavors of a layered lasagna — rich meat ragù, herb-tomato broth, and three cheeses — cooked together in a single pot with lasagna noodles broken into pieces and simmered directly in the sauce. The noodles release starch into the broth as they cook, naturally thickening it into something between a soup and a sauce. The finishing move: a generous cold dollop of ricotta-mozzarella-Parmesan blended together, plopped into the center of each hot bowl. It melts and streaks through the red broth as you eat. No layering, no béchamel, no baking dish.

45 min540 kcal6 serves

🌶️Spicy

★4.7

🇫🇷FranceAdvanced

Soups

Lobster Bisque (Bisque de Homard)

Bisque de homard is the most luxurious soup in the classical French repertoire: a deeply orange, velvety-smooth cream soup built entirely on the flavor extracted from lobster shells. The technique is methodical — the shells are roasted hard in butter until they smell nutty and oceanic, the aromatics are sweated, cognac is added and often flambéed, white wine and fish stock are added, and the whole mixture simmers for 30 to 40 minutes to extract every molecule of flavor from the shells. The stock is then strained, blended, passed through a fine sieve, enriched with double cream, and mounted with cold butter to a glossy, coating consistency. A swirl of cream and a few morsels of lobster meat garnish each bowl. Nothing is wasted: the shells that look like kitchen scraps become the foundation of one of the most complex, satisfying soups in existence.

90 min520 kcal4 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

★4.5

🇲🇦MoroccoAdvanced

Soups

Harira

Harira is Morocco's most important soup. The name comes from the Arabic word for silk — a reference to the velvety texture it gets from a flour-and-water slurry (tedouira) stirred in at the end. Every Moroccan family has their version, but the spine is always the same: tomatoes, chickpeas, lentils, fresh herbs, ginger, and warm spices. It is the soup that breaks the Ramadan fast every evening at iftar, served alongside dates, hard-boiled eggs, and chebakia cookies. It is also eaten through the rest of the year, as a starter or as a meal in itself. The lamb version is the most traditional, but the vegetarian version is nearly as popular.

90 min320 kcal6 serves

★4.7

🇳🇬NigeriaAdvanced

Cereal and Pasta Dishes

Nigerian Jollof Rice

Jollof rice is West Africa's most debated dish. Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese — every country insists its version is definitive. The Nigerian version is built on a tomato-pepper base cooked down until brick-red and deeply savory, then the rice steams under foil and a tight lid until each grain is separate and fully flavoured. The smoky bottom — the slightly scorched layer called party jollof — is not a mistake. It's the point. Serve with fried plantains and coleslaw.

75 min420 kcal6 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

★4.8

🇪🇹EthiopiaMedium

Soups

Misir Wot (Ethiopian Red Lentil Stew)

Misir wot is built on three things: onions cooked down until they disappear, berbere bloomed in spiced butter, and red lentils that turn creamy without losing structure. It's the dish that appears on every Ethiopian vegetarian platter, scooped up with injera. The flavor is hot, earthy, and faintly bitter from the berbere spice blend. Better the next day. Much better.

60 min285 kcal4 serves

🌱Vegan🌶️Spicy💪High protein

★4.9

🇺🇸USAAdvanced

Soups

Cioppino

A San Francisco seafood stew of Italian-American origin: Dungeness crab, clams, mussels, shrimp, and white fish simmered in a tomato-and-white-wine broth scented with fennel and garlic. Born as a fishermen's communal pot, it is served with sourdough for soaking up the broth.

50 min360 kcal6 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free🌶️Spicy

★4.9

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 beef ground beef tomatoes potato eggplant ginger ricotta mozzarella