What to use instead of tomato paste
It depends entirely on what it's doing in the dish. Here's the job, what else does it, and what to skip.
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Concentrated savour fried into the fat at the start of a braise
Paste is tomato reduced to about a quarter of its volume, so it is dense in glutamate and sugar. A minute or two frying in oil darkens those sugars, and that is where the brick-red depth in a goulash comes from.
Passata simmered downRan out
1/4 cup passata reduced to 1 tbsp
Same end point after about ten extra minutes, and slightly brighter because it has not been commercially cooked as long.
Sun-dried tomato pasteRan out
1:1
Sweeter and more leathery, with an oily sheen from the packing oil. Good in a ragu, heavy in a light soup.
Turkish red pepper paste (biber salcasi)Ran out
1:1
Sweet pepper instead of tomato, less acid and a deeper red. It is the correct ingredient for karniyarik and tepsi baytinijan anyway.
KetchupRan out
2 tbsp ketchup per 1 tbsp paste, minus 1 tsp sugar and 1 tsp vinegar elsewhere
Brings its own sugar, vinegar, onion and clove. Fine in a meatloaf glaze, obvious and wrong in a Persian or Indian base.
What doesn't work: Pasta sauce or pizza sauce measured spoon for spoon. Both are mostly water with oregano and garlic already in them, so a tablespoon adds nearly no concentration; use six times as much and you have watered down the braise and seasoned it Italian.
Umami and body without adding much liquid
Paste is how you make a stew taste of more without thinning it, which is why it turns up in dishes that are not tomato dishes at all.
Miso, stirred in off the heatRan out
1 tsp white or red miso per 1 tbsp paste
Savoury and salty with no acidity and no red colour. Cut the salt elsewhere, and do not boil it hard or it goes grainy and flat.
Dried mushroom powderPlant-based
1 tsp powder per 1 tbsp paste
Earthy rather than fruity, and the pot goes browner instead of redder.
Anchovy pasteRan out
1 tsp per 1 tbsp tomato paste
Deeper savour and no colour at all, and it reads as fish if the rest of the dish is delicate.
Yeast extractPlant-based
1/2 tsp per 1 tbsp paste
Very salty and it darkens the pot fast. Half a teaspoon is the ceiling before it dominates everything.
What doesn't work: More salt in place of the paste. Salt makes what is already present taste stronger, and it adds no glutamate of its own, so a stew missing its tomato paste simply becomes a salty stew that still tastes thin.