How to Make Pizza Sauce

How to Make Pizza Sauce Today, we’re doing a viewer request. Connie does not like how store-bought pizza sauce taste, neither do I, so we’re going to make our own. It’s really easy. You need one 28 ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes. Get a really good variety. If you can find San Marzano, they are the best. You Google that. You’ve heard me talk about those before, a really, really nice sweet variety. But any high quality whole peeled tomatoes are going to work. You’re going to need some garlic. I’m going to go probably three or four cloves of that, that’s up to you; a couple of tablespoons of nice olive oil. We’re going to spice it up a little bit with some red pepper flakes, about a half of teaspoon from me. We’re going to need some salt, of course. I’m going to use about half a teaspoon to start and then I will adjust that later and a little pinch of sugar, maybe a third of a teaspoon, just a pinch to sweeten it up just to tad. Some dried Italian herbs; that’s a half a teaspoon of your classic dry Italian mix. That’s marjoram, thyme, basil, rosemary, oregano. And then a half a teaspoon or maybe a little more -- half a teaspoon officially of dry oregano, that’s straight oregano. Step one, take your tomatoes out of the can and we’re going to have to take the seeds out. One reason the canned store box sauce taste kind of lousy is they process it with the seeds, which gives it kind of an off bitter flavor. By the way, this is for demo purposes only. Don’t cut tomatoes in your hand like I’m doing here. Let me just show you. So, cut them in half on a cutting board. I did that on purpose just to show you that they’re slippery. You got to be careful. So, cut them in half on a cutting board and just squeeze and you should tip your knife. Just try to get out as much seeds as you can. Don’t take an hour to do this. You’re just going to try to get most of the seeds out and there you go. Now, what you can do and what I’m going to do is I’m going to strain the tomato juice back in and just throw away to seeds. Some purists, some pizza sauce aficionados think you should throw the juice and the seeds away. I don’t think it makes that big of a difference. Now, what you want to do is give them a crush. Traditionally, you’ll do it with your hands because that’s how my grandma did it, that’s how my mom did it, that’s how my aunt does it, that’s how my uncle does it, that’s how I do it. If you’re a little daintier, you can get a potato masher and do it that way. But you want to cook this with the tomato pretty much broken up. I’m going to explain it later. Again, at the end of this, you’re going to have some options. If you have one of these food mills, also very nice for this job, it will actually crush them and strain out the seeds at the same time but there we go. Either way you did it. There’s our can of tomatoes, ready to make a sauce with. Now, it starts with a warm saucepan. It’s on low. I put in my olive oil. I put in my three cloves of chopped garlic and I’m just going to bring that slowly up to temperature with a wooden spoon, just give it a little stir until the garlic starts to sing. Meaning I can hear it, it starts to sizzle. By the way, that saying sounds much better in Italian although I forgot it. But anyway, as soon as the garlic just starts to sizzle, you just hear and it starts singing to you, you’re going to add your dry herbs. That’s the oregano, the mixed Italian herbs and your chilly flakes, your chilly pepper. Now, this technique is actually borrowed form Indian and Asian cuisine. Really common, they warm up or give their dry herbs and spices a little sauté before they add the wet ingredients. It brings up more the flavor, I really like the technique. It’s a little bit dangerous though because if your heat’s too high, you burn that stuff, you just get a terrible mess on your hands But since we are on low heat, I don’t think there’s much danger here. So, that was just literally 20, 30 seconds in the warm oil. And now, we’re going to add our tomato. So, dump in your tomato. Again, that’s a 28 ounce can. Let’s give it a stir. Now, we’re going to simmer this on low for approximately 30 minutes. So, I want you to add your salt, that’s about a half a teaspoon. Of course, taste and adjust that later. A little pinch of sugar, it just sweetens it up just a hair. Now, I’m going to add half a cup of water because some of the liquid obviously is going to evaporate out of this. I don’t want this to get too thick. I don’t want this to turn into tomato paste and I just think it simmers because I do like to simmer it like I said for about half an hour or 40 minutes, so I really cook in that garlic and the herbs and all the flavors. So to me, that half of cup water, that’s going to evaporate up out of there after half an hour. Now here is the secret ingredient, baking soda. This is grandma’s top secret recipe. In fact, I actually had to wait until she passed away before I could show it publicly for fear of retribution. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to add just a pinch, like a 1/16th of a teaspoon of baking soda. And the soda, if you ever made the little -- remember the volcano in science class? The soda reacts with the acid in the tomato and this kind of little -- I don’t know, foam, pink foam-like substance comes to the top. You skim that off and the theory is that it actually improves the flavor of the sauce and you don’t get heartburn. So, I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. In fact, if that’s not true and it does nothing to do with it, don’t even send me that email. I’d like to think that that works. So, that was for grandma. And then I’m going to take my stick blender and give it a little buzz here. You could leave it chunky if you want. From this point on, this is totally up to you. I do prefer a smooth, pizza sauce. Some people prefer the chunky premixed tomato sauce. So, you can actually do in deep dish. People tend to like the chunkier but for me, I like it that way. So there we go, homemade pizza sauce, so much better tasting, not having those season there, makes a big difference. Possibly grandma’s baking soda pinch trick did something to it. What I’m going to do with this -- what do you think I was going to do with that? I’m going to make pizza. So, there are no top secret tricks there. In fact, we will be making pizza dough very soon. So, stay tuned, thank you for watching. I hope you’re visiting the new FoodWishes.com site and as always, enjoy!