Breadhead Friday: Pizza Sauce Recipe

Pursuant to the post on making pizza at home, I want to give out my recipe for pizza sauce.  It's easy, quick, and tasty.  There's a brightness to it from the red wine vinegar, a little heat from the red pepper flake, and enough spices to give it great flavor, but not overwhelm the toppings and crust.

And the best part is that you don't have to cook it.  The sauce cooks on the pizza itself.

This recipe is the product of trial and error across dozens of pizzas, and will make enough sauce to cover five (5) average-sized pies.

Ingredients
1 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes
1 28 oz. can of tomato puree
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 and 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 tbsp basil
1 and 1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp black pepper
A few shakes of red pepper flake
Salt to taste

Mise en place

All you have to do is put the ingredients into a bowl and mix them with a whisk.  Couldn't be easier.

In the bowl, ready to be whisked

Once you've got it mixed together, give it a little taste.  I know it's not cooked, but it'll be okay, I promise.  The tomatoes have been steamed as part of the canning process.  If it needs salt, add salt.

All mixed up

If you use the pizza recipe linked at the top of this post, you'll see that the pizza is baked at a pretty high heat (500 degrees F or higher).  So you don't need to cook the sauce: it's a thin layer on the dough that will get cooked as part of the baking process.

The sauce is on the pizza - REPEAT: the sauce is on the pizza

Portion out the sauce into five containers and freeze or refrigerate them as you see fit.  You may want to make this sauce a couple hours before making the pizza to allow the flavors to meld.

The distribution of pepperoni here is reminiscent of the Tunguska Explosion of 1908

There you go.  Now you've got one less excuse to go to Pizza Hut.  Not that there's anything wrong with Pizza Hut.