As keen home cooks, we love preparing a wide variety of dishes. We take just as much pride in cooking a quick and easy one-pot meal that only requires a few ingredients as we do when spending all day perfecting a grandiose dinner of epic proportions. And while we’ll happily browse the world food aisle in the supermarket or seek out a specific product to make something we’ve read about or tasted when eating out, there are some ingredients we always have in our cupboards.
Things like salt and oil tend to make their way into virtually everything we cook and you’ll rarely find a pantry without them, but there’s another vital essential that’s become a staple in the British culinary canon – tinned tomatoes. These ubiquitous little cans are used weekly by the vast majority of home cooks to create a wide array of sauces, stews and one-pots, happily sitting on our shelves until they’re called upon. They’re especially useful when preparing dishes from countries like Italy, Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean – an area which requires plenty of sweet tomato flavour in its cuisine.
It’s easy to wax lyrical about the joys of fresh peas, the short asparagus season or how important salt is in cooking, but we think it’s high time to give tinned tomatoes the respect they deserve. That’s why we’ve put together six of our favourite recipes that put these heroes of the kitchen front and centre. Take a look and make the most of this incredible ingredient.
