Basic Pizza Sauce
The more I learnd to cook, the less I liked to buy pre-made or packaged foods. However, I still like the same foods; I just prefer to make them myself. If you had told me 20 years ago that I could make my own pizza, I would have stared at you blankly, and asked, “why?” But today my preference is to make my own, and I know the answers why: cost, taste, freshness, and control of fat, salt, and artificial ingredients.
Today I will describe the makings of a basic pizza sauce, with the intent of adding a post later to tell you about some of the pizza crusts you can make. Pizza sauce, besides being used for pizza, can also be used as a base for other sauces, such as spaghetti and lasagna, and can be used as a flavor enhancer for a lot of other dishes, like sloppy joes.
You can make this sauce using fresh tomotoes if you like, but I very rarely do. Fresh tomatoes can be expensive, are quite seasonal, and take a lot longer to cook to the desired consistency. But if you decide to go fresh, use Roma tomatoes; they have a lot of flavor, are denser than other varieties and contain less water. Camparis are also very good. However, as stated, I generally do not use fresh, but go with canned diced tomatoes and tomato paste. The fewer the ingredients in the canned tomatoes, the happier I am, and when I see a can of tomatoes that has nothing BUT tomatoes, that’s what I buy.
The remaining ingredients include olive oil, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, dried italian seasonings (oregano, marjoram, thyme, basil, savory and sage) and a bay leaf or two. If you like a bit of spiciness you can add chili flakes to the list. For a slightly sharper taste, you can add a bit of balsamic vinegar.
To start, finely chop your onion; the smaller you chop it, the smoother the texture of the sauce become. Heat some olive oil in your pot at medium low and add the chopped onion. Sprinkle some salt on the onions. While these begin to sweat, crush your garlic cloves and remove the peels. Chop these finely, and add to the onions. Garlic cooks faster than onions do, so I always start the onions and crush and chop the garlic to give the onions a head start.
Once the onion and garlic has softened a bit (the onions will look a bit translucent), add your dried herbs and bay leaf (and chili flakes if you opted for them), and allow the mixture to cook a bit longer. Once of the secrets to using dried herbs and spices is to add them before the liquid ingredients. This allows the oil to become infused with the flavor of the spices, which makes sure the flavors will get into all the ingredients. With this in mind, make sure you wait before adding vinegar, should you decide to use it.
After a minute or two of cooking with the herbs, add your tomato and tomato paste. Tomato paste is used for thickness as well as an extra hit of flavor. It is more intense than diced tomatoes, so you do not need as much of it. 3 or 4 to 1 is a good ratio, which is fairly easy to achieve, since the cans tend to be sold in sizes that match this ratio.
Once all the ingredients are in the pot, mix well and increase the heat to medium-high. When you see bubbles, reduce the heat to simmer and cover. You can cook this sauce at a low temperature for about an hour before you would need to add water to replace that which has evaporated. Just be sure to stir the sauce occassionally so it does not stick to the bottom. Also, too high a heat will burn the tomato, and give it a bitter flavor, so this is to be avoided at all costs.
Once it is done cooking, if your texture is too lumpy you can run it through a food processor or blender. Because the sauce is hot you do NOT want to over-fill the blender or processor: heated air and steam will be realeased when you start blending, which will cause spill-overs. Tomato is not easy to clean, as I know too well from personal experience. If you have one of those hand-held blenders, that would be the ideal thing to use.
This sauce will serve you well, not only for pizzas, but for anything else that requires a good tomato sauce. You will have noticed that I did not mention amounts of the ingredients, and this is on purpose. You can adjust the quantities to please your own palate, as well as adding new ingredients or replacing others. It will keep in a closed container in the refrigerator for a few days, but I doubt very much that it would stay there that long: it is a very tasty sauce, indeed!
Yours in Good Taste,
Erik Christensen