Here's a thing you should pretty much never do: squeeze a dollop of store-bought tomato paste directly into a bubbling broth (or sauce—or anywhere else for that matter). And that's because tomato paste straight out of the tube (or can) has a tart, mineral flavor that won't do your dish any good.
Instead, the secret to using tomato paste is to caramelize it—really caramelize it—before any liquid is added to the pot. This doesn't mean that you need a second cooking vessel every time time you make tomato sauce. The method goes like this: sauté some onions, carrots, garlic, or other aromatics until they've softened and are almost as dark as you'd like them to be (they'll continue cooking with the paste). Add any spices and sauté briefly to release their essential oils. Add tomato paste and continue cooking until the paste has changed from bright to brick red. Deglaze with wine or whatever other liquid you're using.
A full 1/2 cup of tomato paste is the base for Rigatoni With Easy Vodka Sauce. Deeply caramelizing the paste make all the difference.
"When you caramelize tomato paste you're concentrating the natural sugars in the paste," says Senior Food Editor Anna Stockwell. The browning reaction will also amp up other complex flavors in the paste: tomato paste is full of glutamates, which naturally enhance a dish's umami, or savory quality.
Anna warns that she thinks many people only think they're caramelizing their tomato paste when they're really only warming it through. Directly out of the tube or can, tomato paste is typically a bright, fiery red. Anna says it should be cooked until it is "noticeably less vibrant" (see photo at the top for reference).
Cooking a little tomato paste until it reaches that dark color is a smart trick for making any savory dish (not just pasta sauce!) more interesting, and more satiating. Deploy it in chili, in any stew or any soup with a tomato component, or even just to add rich flavor to a middling store-bought stock.
In fact, you can also deploy this trick in many dishes where tomato isn't the primary focus: I recently caramelized tomato paste when making an otherwise tomato-free chicken stew, just to give the dish a little underlying sweetness and savoriness. It didn't make the stew overtly tomatoey, just wonderfully savory. And hauntingly sweet. And just as delicious as I hoped it would be.
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