Last week I was creating a recipe and decided that I needed 1 cup of tomato sauce. Since I was creating a recipe you would think I would use ingredients that I have on hand, but no, my imagination is bigger than my pantry. After searching to no avail for tomato sauce, I looked for some of the usual replacements: tomato paste and spaghetti sauce.
To substitute tomato paste for tomato sauce, use equal parts water and tomato paste to reach your desired amount of tomato sauce. So in this case I would have used 1/2 cup tomato paste and 1/2 water. But I didn’t have any tomato paste.
You can use spaghetti sauce one for one with tomato sauce and then decrease the recipe’s spices to allow for the spices in the spaghetti sauce. But I didn’t have any spaghetti sauce. All I had on hand was diced tomatoes.
How I used diced tomatoes to create a substitute for tomato sauce.
I put a can of diced tomatoes with the juice in the blender and pureed the the tomatoes. The pureed tomatoes were a red-orange color and had a few seeds, but worked just fine in the recipe in place of tomato sauce.
How have you been making do or doing without?
This post is linked to Kitchen Tip Tuesday and Works for Me Wednesday.
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Corinne T says
Thanks for the great tips, I went to find tomato sauce to find I didn’t have any. So going to try the tomato paste today.
And read all of the replies, and also learned to freeze left overs cause I don’t use alot of tomatoes, and find they don’t keep in the fridge for very long.
So off now to make Beef Stew in the Crock Pot!
Marilyn says
My husband is on a low salt diet so I’ve been pureeing the no salt diced tomatoes in juice for years. Works great and keeps sodium within reason.
Amanda says
I am always having to deal with the "no tomato sauce dilema." You would think after dozens of times of it happening I would keep a ton on hand…. Thanks for sharing all the different alternatives 🙂
Alea Milham says
Great tip; thanks for sharing it. I rarely use tomato sauce in recipes and the last 2 weeks I have decided that 3 different recipes "needed" it.
KarlaG says
I have been doing this for years. If you can get a good price on a big can of storebought, you can use what you need and then freeze the rest in ice cube trays or small plastic containers, and when they are frozen, decant them into a ziploc bag, and then just take out what you need, and drop it into the food.
Swathi says
If possible I make fresh sauce and big can of store bought usually gets spoiled after open so quickly.
KerryAnn says
I've done that before and it does work. Right now I'm doing a lot of vegetable substituting. Using what is in season in a recipe that calls for out of season veggies. It's quite possible as long as you make sure the spices match what you've chosen to use, and the hardness of the veggie is close to the hardness of what is called for in the original recipe. Otherwise, you have to adjust cooking times.