If you haven’t yet, check out the previous pizza posts - Introduction, dough.

Inspirations

This sauce recipe is based on Bon Appetit’s from their “Making Perfect” Pizza. There’s really two guiding principle from this recipe that I adopt:

1. Pizza sauce is optimally sweet and acidic - flavors which complement the fats from the cheese (and possibly meats) and the umami/bready flavors of the dough. This is not the time for a rich, deep sauce that’s been on the stove top for 24 hours. That’s a beautifal bath for meatballs, not a topping for pizza. Pizza is a time for raw tomatoes to shine with just a few light additions to bring things together.

2. As stated in the introduction, the amount of water on top of our dough can make or break the bake (especially depending on the oven). Tomatoes already have a lot of water so let’s make sure not to add any more than we need and skip the canning juices.

I make slight modifications to the Bon Appetit recipe.

• Increase the garlic
• Go by taste and “look” for the salt, olive oil, and black pepper (everyone likes their sauce different) but, in general, increase the salt slightly.

Ingredients

Makes about a quart of sauce - good for a 8-10 pizzas

• 28 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes (drained of canning liquid)
• 5-6 thin shavings of fresh garlic
• 1-2 tbsps olive oil
• 0.5-1 tsp kosher salt
• Several cranks of fresh black pepper

Instructions

1. Combine everything but half of the salt (we can add more later but can’t take it away) and then use a hand blender to break down the tomatoes and mix everything.
   • The olive oil shouldn’t be pooling because there’s so much but you should be able to taste it so adjust to how you prefer.
   • You can use a regular blender or food processor instead.
   • You can leave it a bit chunky if you’d like.
2. Give the blended mixture a taste and add salt until you’ve switched from thinking “this is sweet and acidic and just tastes like tomatoes” to “oh that’s a little salty.” The final mixture should be a little salty. You’ll notice it because you’re incrementally adding salt and looking for the change. Everyone else is just going to keep asking what makes the sauce taste so good.
   • You can always get a small bowl of the blended tomatoes and add a bit of salt at a time until you get the taste you want and then repeat for the main bowl now that you know what to taste for.
   • If you still don’t believe me about tasting for “a little salty”… If you’ve had bland pizza, I’d be willing to bet it’s because it didn’t have enough salt. The sauce is a way to disperse salt on your pizza evenly. A bite of pizza only has so much sauce but it has to do the job of evenly salting that mouthful. So don’t be stingy and taste as you go!
     • Okay, there’s some salt in the dough and in a cured meat topping if you add that but (a) the dough can only be so salty before it hurts the yeast activity and (b) your pepperoni is supposed to raise the salt level, not act as the baseline source of salt.