Some people like a rich sauce with herbs and garlic, some like an ultra simple sauce with nothing but tomato – the DOC standard (which dictates how traditional Italian pizza is made) is to use nothing but crushed tinned San Marzano tomatoes. There’s a lot of opinions about what makes a good pizza sauce and of course no one recipe to rule them all – if it tastes good to you, then it’s ‘right’ (unless you simply must have a DOC pizza of course…). For me a fairly simple sauce with just a hint of extra herbs is best, a good burst of tomato acidity and sweetness that still lets the other ingredients shine through.
- 1 Tin of good tomatoes, preferably skinned whole tomatoes. San Marzano are traditional but there’s good and bad brands like everything else. A good tin of generic plum tomatoes is much nicer than a bad tin of San Marzanos. If you make pasta or pizza sauce regularly it is worth buying a few different brands that are easy to find in your area and comparing them to find the nicest.
- 1 generous pinch of dried oregano – the good stuff is sometimes sold as ‘Mediterranean oregano’, an olive/tan colour with a pungent aroma from the dried flowers.
- 1 generous pinch of salt
Tip all ingredients into a bowl and use a stick blender to briefly pulse and break up the whole tomatoes. Don’t overdo the blending – a little texture in the sauce is nice. If you don’t want to use a blender, use kitchen scissors to snip the whole tomatoes into pieces or just squish them with a spatula or even with bare hands. Good tinned tomatoes shouldn’t taste bitter but if yours do, add a little pinch of sugar to the sauce for balance. You might also find that the taste of some tinned tomatoes is a little dull or flat – in this case 1 tsp of lemon juice can give a lift.
I got to have some garlic in mine, oil garlic, then I reduce the tomatoes very slowly and finaly basil or pesto, salt and pepper and all in a blender 🙂
Hi Kosta, good point about garlic, I do sometimes mash up a fresh clove of garlic and some basil in mine as well! Sometimes I prefer the taste when the tomatoes are put on uncooked, but I will give your recipe a try too next time!
400 grm can of crushed Itallian tomato
medium onion diced
6 cloves of garlic sliced thinly not crushed
two teaspoons od dried oregano
salt to taste
two tblspoons of olive oil
two large dried celery leaves
sautea onions till transparent with about one teaspoon of the garlic
add oregano and turn up heat to bring up oregano flavour
pour tomato onto mix and add other ingredients
lower heat and simmer with lid on to develop flavours remove lid to thicken
can be reduced rapidly if you want sauce now, like 20 mins total prep
A basic tomato sauce that can be altered and added to for many other dishes