
Try a pinch at first and then perform a taste test. This is a season-to-taste proposition you'll have to experiment with a little. To make your paste and water mixture taste more like full-bodied tomato sauce, add a little sugar to combat the acidic bite, and include a few of your favorite spices like salt, pepper, garlic powder or onion powder. Although you can use it without additional seasonings, you may be disappointed with the results unless the dish you're making has lots of other highly seasoned ingredients to help camouflage your sauce's lack of zest. The flavor may vary a little from brand to brand, but most varieties will taste sweeter, saltier and more savory than plain, diluted tomato paste. It won't taste exactly like tomato sauce, though. Adding one cup of water to three-quarters of a cup of tomato paste will result in a tomato base with the same texture and thickness as tomato sauce (after some brisk stirring). Because tomato paste is a concentrated form of tomato puree, you can dilute it to the consistency of tomato sauce without much fuss. When making tomato sauce from tomato paste, there's some good news and some bad news. Luckily, tomatoes are flexible fruits (yes, they're actually a fruit), and you can often perform a little kitchen wizardry to modify one type of tomato product to do double duty in a pinch. Or, you'll need tomato sauce, but all you have available is a small can of tomato paste. Chances are that at one time or another you'll be holding a can of stewed tomatoes in your hand while the recipe you're trying to make calls for whole tomatoes.

There are so many tomato-based products on the market that it can be hard to find cupboard space for all of them.
