Make delicious, slightly sweet pizza sauce at home with some tomato sauce and a few spices. It takes about 20 minutes and will be WAY better than any canned sauce you've ever tried.
If you want to learn how to make pizza this delicious looking at home (it rivals wood oven pizza - and I can say that because I built my own wood fired pizza oven) then check out this step-by-step guide to making pizza at home.
I'm about to say something very, very controversial and I want you to prepare yourselves for it. By prepare yourselves, I mean get ready to gasp and slap the person sitting closest to you. It's entirely possible someone is about to take legal action against me for what I'm about to say. Someone might indeed sue me. I would like to officially declare that ...
Lebanese people make the best pizza in the world.
There. I've said it. And that's "Lebanese", not "Lesbians", although I'm sure there are a few fantastic pizza making lesbians out there. If they happen to be Lebanese ... all the better. Have I just made a generalization based on race? Yup. Yes I have. I have done some racial profiling on my blog here. I also think Asian babies are the cutest of all babies. Except for cat babies. There's nothing cuter than a kitten.
When my friend Anj and I were super-cool and young and hip and actually left our houses and saw each other, we were always on the hunt for the perfect pizza. We found that perfect pizza one night in a small Lebanese restaurant that didn't know enough about pizza to slice the olives they put on top of it. But they had the best pizza sauce I've ever tasted. It was the sauce that made the pizza.
What distinguished it was a slight sweetness. Just a bit. It's not like we were eating caramelized pizza sauce, it was just ... a tad sweet. If you weren't a pizza professional like Anj and I you might not even notice it. Our quest then continued into the grocery stores to find a similar canned pizza sauce. And believe it or not we did find something fairly similar to the delicious Lebanese pizza sauce, but the company who made the canned sauce quickly went out of business and has never been heard from again.
When I asked a different friend of mine what the best pizza he'd ever eaten was he cited a place in Ottawa, Canada called The Colonnade. An establishment run by ... wait for it ... a Lebanese family. I know.
I've been making my own pizza since I was a kid, and I spent decades trying to find the perfect canned sauce. God help me, for some reason it never occurred to me to just make my own sauce. It's like I had a pizza sauce mental block. When I finally grabbed a pan, some tomato sauce and a few spices I was stunned at the incredible results.
I came up with a pizza sauce recipe that would make any Lebanese proud. An Italian too, I think. And an Asian baby. And of course all lesbians.
Just sautee the garlic in some olive oil for a little bit, then shove in everything else and simmer until reduced to pizza sauce thickness. Takes about a half an hour or so. If you don't happen to have 4 cups of home pressed tomatoes around you can use crushed tomatoes or even tomato juice with a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste added in. (the tomato juice and tomato paste concoction will take longer to reduce)
Homemade Pizza Sauce
Ingredients
- 1 litre tomato sauce
- 1 tablespoon brown sugar
- ¼ teaspoon oregano dried
- ¼ teaspoon basil dried
- ¼ teaspoon dried pepper flakes
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 pinch garlic powder
- 1 pinch onion powder
- 1 pinch thyme
- 1 clove garlic
Instructions
- Sauté garlic in olive oil over low heat until it starts to smell good.
- Add the remaining ingredients and simmer until thickened. - about ½ an hour.
Notes
Now, as happy as I am with the pizza sauce, if you're interested in a more classic Italian pizza sauce recipe, that's in the step-by-step guide to pizza post I mentioned earlier.
I live in a condo, so I have limited space. I do have a garden in a public plot so I have lots of tomatoes. I don't have room for the tomato sauce so I go right to the pizza sauce stage. I put my tomatoes in the blender and whiz them up. Then I strain the resulting juice. The seeds and skin bits are very dry. I have a recipe that I got years ago for pizza sauce, but I use it for everything. It's nice and thick. I add the citric acid and salt, and water bath can the product. This has saved me lots of shelf space and I'm not dead yet.
Karen,
Thanks so much for your recipe. This tomato sauce is so good I’m fighting the temptation to put a straw into the pot and drink it!
Don't fight it. Just do it. ;) ~ karen!
Duck babies and llama babies have Asians and kittens beat, but the All-Time, Grand Champeen of Cuteness is goat babies.
Kittens take to long to get to the goofy, silly, drop the lifestyle of the moderately wealthy and kinda famous, to start blogging stage.
On another tangent, dug the pond out this year, so the forge and pizza oven are coming out of the clay(and cow goat and chicken poop) that is drying on the hill.
The first pizza is going to the neighbour, gotta let that bake out a bit.
Well, Mel, then lucky for you the recipe is actually printed right on the photo. (there was never a link to the recipe because of that, lol) ~ karen!
Nooooo the photo with the recipe is broken! I should have printed it, I'm making pizza tonight!