A combination of high electricity prices and bad weather has led to salad items being rationed in supermarkets around Britain. Many shoppers at Asda, Morrisons, Tesco, Aldi and Lidl will have, in recent days, encountered empty green crates in the fresh produce aisle, or sales of broccoli and tomatoes capped at three a customer.
The tomato shortage, in particular, has been a rude awakening, given that so many midweek no-recipe fallbacks use them. Here, then, are a dozen ideas for making versions of those meals when you can’t get hold of fresh, bottled or even tinned tomatoes and don’t want to reach for the puree or ketchup.
1. Red pasta sauce
Anyone with an allergy to nightshade vegetables (which include tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, chillies and aubergines) will be familiar with nomato sauce. Recipes usually combine carrots, celery and butternut squash with beetroot. Depending on how much you like the earthy sweetness of beetroot, you can use anything from a single beet to a vac-pack of four little ones.
Blitz the cooked or steamed veg with onion and garlic, sauteed in olive oil, balancing out the flavour with vinegar (red wine or balsamic) and sweetness (honey or sugar). Finally, season with salt and pepper to taste and add finely chopped fresh herbs.
Roasting tomatoes is always a good way to start a rich sauce – and so with carrots. Slow-roast a bunch in butter and olive oil, as the Swedish chef Simon Bajada does for a beautiful soup he serves with fresh cheese and black bread. When you come to blitz them, use only as much vegetable stock as you need to achieve a sauce consistency. Fold in a fresh herb mix and season well.
The Ask Lindsey advice column on DeliaOnline suggests using a slow-cooked courgette base, with the umami brought by a good helping of white miso.
2. Creamy pasta sauce
“Yoghurt,” says Yotam Ottolenghi in his 2020 book Flavour, “as opposed to cream, has a natural acidity, so it makes creamy pasta sauces which are rich but not in any way cloying or unctuous.” Considering tomato brings acidity, this feels like a good alternative. Ottolenghi pairs his warm, cumin-flecked yoghurt sauce (stabilised with a couple of egg yolks and about a teaspoon of cornflour) with roasted butternut squash.
3. Pizza sauce
If you have not yet sampled the joy of a white pizza, now is the time. Rachel Roddy stresses that a proper yeasted dough is crucial for Roman pizza bianco, the topping being a drizzle of olive oil with prosciutto, parmesan and figs in the summer. As it is winter, you may want something more seasonal, so spread your base with ricotta, cream cheese, mascarpone, cottage cheese or creme fraiche. Vegan options include chickpea puree and cashew cream. Top as you wish.
4. Lasagne
There are so many options here. Butternut squash and sage. Salmon, sweet potato and greens. Caramelised onion, mushroom and blue cheese. J Kenji López-Alt’s spinach version is quite simple: he sautees the leaves with shallots and garlic in butter and olive oil, then drains them of all moisture, before chopping up and adding to a mix of ricotta or cottage cheese, blitzed with an egg, lots of parmesan, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Then he layers as many prepped lasagne sheets as the spinach mix will take, with dollops of a cheesy white sauce to bind everything.
5. BLT
Tomato, as Dana Velden highlights on the Kitchn website, is fundamental to sandwich-building, for the “colour, flavour, juiciness and texture” it brings. Nonetheless, she offers a multitude of substitute slices. These include: baked or roasted root veg (butternut squash, turnips or swede); lemon-dressed cooked potato; roasted peppers from a jar; raw or cooked beetroot; pickles (courgette, aubergine, radish); persimmon; apple; pear; fig; kumquat; and kiwi. All of these know what to do with salty bacon and crispy iceberg.
6. Dal
Meera Sodha adds tamarind paste, for its tomato-like balance of sweetness and sourness, to her coconut chicken curry and her spinach and pigeon pea dal. Also, I love her quick coconut dal (from 2019’s East). Fry finely chopped red onion with curry leaves, finely chopped garlic and green chilli and a stick each of cinnamon and lemongrass. Next, add red lentils and turmeric, a can of coconut milk and the same again of water, simmering for 20 to 25 minutes, until tender. Season with salt and lime juice.
7. Beans
If your comfort go-to is on the baked beans scale, a dearth of tomatoes will put you in a bind. Here, again, Roddy delivers. Starting with dry pulses, which she soaks, she slow-cooks broad beans with onion, potato and fennel; cannellini beans with garlic and sage; white beans with garlic, sage, greens and pumpkin, or garlic, chilli and chard, or simply bay and garlic. Often served with something salty (bacon, sausage, clams, tuna and onion), always soft to the point of melting, these are every bit as life-giving as a can of Heinz.
8. Bolognese sauce
I once made my mother Colman Andrews’ mince and tatties, a dish Andrews had described to me as his ultimate taste of home. Mashed potatoes with as much butter and double cream as he plumps for will, of course, always please. But it was the mince that almost had us in tears – and without a tomato in sight.
Gently brown onion, then ground beef, in a little oil, then add sliced carrot, toasted oats and, if you have any, black pudding. Season generously, cover with water and cook until the carrots are soft and the whole thing a thick stew. I have eaten this on spaghetti, on couscous, on toast, on said tatties and straight from the pan.
Roddy’s ragu alla bolognese is similarly devoid of redness. She starts with a soffrito of onion, carrot and celery, which she fries in oil and butter, with some pancetta or bacon and a bay leaf. Then, she adds mince – beef and pork, with livers, if any are to hand.
After browning, she deglazes the pan with wine (red or white) and stock, in which she has diluted one tablespoon of tomato paste, but which I would have no trouble doing without. She cooks this down – seasoning well and adding milk – for the length of a movie. As she says: “The sauce should be rich, and thick, with very little liquid, but not dry, so keep an eye on it.”
If redness is a must in your bolognese, put that nomato sauce to work. Brown your meat and add the sauce as you would tomato.
9. Meatballs, shakshuka, stuffed veg, oven bakes
Use the nomato to braise your meatballs, bake your pasta, poach your eggs, stuff your peppers, courgettes, aubergines or squashes, and assemble your moussaka.
10. Salad
A sun-ripened tomato is peerless. However, when paired with a creamy fresh cheese, it is the tomato’s combination of sweetness, acidity and crunch that is hardest at work, something that other fruit can accomplish. Raspberries, blackberries and strawberries are lovely with olive oil, herbs and salty cheese.
Ottolenghi credits a tomato salad by Peter Gordon with the inspiration for his melon and buffalo mozzarella platter, the fresh cream and fruity flesh enhanced with roasted buckwheat groats and black mustard seeds.
Olia Hercules, meanwhile, does a beautiful salad of peaches or nectarines (use apple or pear in colder months), gooseberries, grapes or plums and tarragon or fennel fronds, dressed with garlic, chilli, honey and seasoned.
Then there is the infinite bounty of pomegranate. Fresh, it has crunch, juiciness and sweetness; reduced to molasses, it is as deeply flavourful as tomato paste and ketchup combined. Try the arils (seeds) with drizzles of molasses and tahini atop a warm salad of roasted aubergine, or with bitter leaves and alliums in a cold salad.
11. Chilli
Texans might call their take on chilli con carne a “bowl o’ red”, but they are adamant it contains neither beans nor tomatoes. Perfect, then, for this here list.
An Epicurious classic – by four Lobels (Stanley, Evan, Mark and David), Mary Goodbody and David Whiteman – has you toasting a bunch of New Mexico, guajillo or pasilla chillies, then soaking them in hot water, draining, deseeding and blending with cumin, pepper and water into a paste. Next, fry some onion and garlic and dilute with beef stock into which you have whisked masa harina (maize flour). Brown pieces of braising steak and add to the stock along with the chilli paste. Simmer and cook until the sauce is thick and the meat tender. Season with brown sugar and white vinegar.
The Dizzy Cook’s tomato-free chilli fries the meat in butter or ghee first, then adds paprika and cinnamon for earthy sweetness.
The New York Times’s Yasmin Fahr, meanwhile, does a non-traditional chilli with peppers and jalapeños, the suggestion being that cherry tomatoes are replaced with a couple of tablespoonfuls of tomato paste. Given that she uses harissa and soy sauce with garlic, cumin and oregano, I would definitely make this without the tomato paste, simply ramping up the harissa.
12. Salsa
This one is easy: salsa verde. Follow Felicity Cloake’s journey through the wealth of recipes she tried to perfect her own, given that, as she puts it, the green sauce is “infinitely tweakable”. In other words, they will all be good, whatever you dollop them on.
Parsley is non-negotiable, but you can try other soft herbs, too (basil, mint, thyme, tarragon). You can combine many alliums, or forgo them; you can add gherkins, capers, olives, vinegar or Ottolenghi’s charred lemon. Don’t be shy of anchovies or heat (I am lost without Turkish pepper flakes). Blitz with, or pound in, a good amount of olive oil and store in the fridge.
