Make A More Robust Tomato Sauce With Something You'd Usually Throw Away

Next time you head to the grocery store, don't just pick up a jar of tomato sauce for your pasta. While it's certainly an easy alternative if you're short on time, making your own tomato sauce is low effort, and it will almost always taste better than the store-bought kind. If you want to heighten your homemade sauce's flavor and are looking for more of a boost than you get from the addition of the usual basil or parsley, then you need to start incorporating fresh tomato leaves. If you've ever grown or picked fresh tomatoes, you will be familiar with the sharp pungent smell of the leaves.

Many people probably don't know that tomato leaves are even edible and tend just to throw them away, but they actually offer a surprisingly robust flavor to your classic tomato sauce. Tomato leaves are bright and herby, with a subtly grassy flavor due to the enzymes and aromatic oil in them. If you let them simmer in the sauce, they'll impart that herby, earthy flavor right into it, leaving the sauce with a more intense profile that you can't get from just basil (though it never hurts to add a little fresh basil, too). The flavor of the leaves is quite strong, so start with a small handful and work your way up from there.

Of course, it's easier to find fresh tomato leaves in the summer months, whether in your garden or at a self-pick farm or CSA. Growing your own tomatoes is a great way to have access to tomato leaves, but if you don't have a green thumb, you might be able to find them at the grocery store year-round. Tomatoes are usually stripped of their leaves prior to landing on the produce shelves, so you'll have to look beyond the piles of individual fruits. Stores usually sell a number of tomato varieties and often have tomatoes on the vine somewhere among the other red fruits. Take a look at the vines, and choose a tomato bunch that has some leaves remaining on those vines — that's your best bet for getting some store-bought tomato leaves.

If all of the vined tomatoes are leafless, you're better off heading to your local farm store or farmers' market. You can still buy tomatoes out of season at the grocery store, but if you're relying on farm-fresh fruit, you'll have the easiest time picking up some leaves in the summer. Even if the farm store doesn't have leaves still attached to the tomatoes, ask someone if they're available — they most likely have a few plants with leaves still attached.