This third installment of my "Homemade Pizza" series, is intended to show off my own perfected tomato sauce. As I've mentioned before (and frequently) you can top your pizza dough with pretty much anything under the sun.
But, for a traditional, delightfully oregano-y and zesty-savoury-sweet pizza sauce... look no further than here!
Start with a soffritto.
Saute some onion in a bit of vegetable (avocado) oil.
After about ten minutes add some whole garlic cloves, and some freshly chopped oregano and thyme.
Toss that about on low heat for another minute or two, then take it off the heat.
When the onion is soft and translucent, and the garlic has only browned slightly, it's done.
Take it off, let it cool if you want, but put it into a food processor and blend the crap out of it.
Add about a dozen roma tomatoes, whole (seeds, skin, and even the green bits on top if you want).
Blend, blend, blend.
Add a generous spoonful or two of salt. Sea salt is best, but if you've got a nice flavoured salt, feel free to go to town.
Myself, I have the perfect salt for pizza sauce:
Tarragon salt.
Anyway, after you blend the whole thing very well, it's good to get poured into a large saucepan.
At this point the sauce is quite runny. Tomatoes do have a large amount of water, after all, even Romas which have some of the lowest water quotient of all the tomatoes.
So what I do is I boil it down for an hour or two.
Bring the mixture to a light blipping and bubbling, and then turn it down to low and place a splatter guard or mesh screen on top. You don't want to preserve the water, so do not use a lid. You want the water to evaporate, after all.
But if you neglect the splatter screen entirely, you better like your kitchen's new coat of tomato-red.
;)
You'll see a marked difference in consistency after even only a half hour or so.
But... I recommend going for a full hour or longer.
This results in a very nice, thick and meaty tomato sauce.
Mmmmmm!!!!
This is my pizza suace.
It's vegan, it's loaded with great veggies and nutrition, and it's intensely flavoured. If you like umami, you'll love this sauce.
If you're looking to impress, say you've got company coming over and for whatever reason decided to cook them homemade pizza, I'd suggest using butter instead of vegetable oil for the soffritto (and cook it for longer on a lower heat, obviously).
But, you can't go wrong with this delicious pizza sauce!
Put it on top of whatever you like, flatbread, pita, or some of the homemade pizza dough you just made!
:)
