Pizza Pizza Pizza - Sauce

After creating a masterpiece of a base for your pizza, you need to lavish it with the best tomato sauce you can.  The sauce is the element that underpins the whole taste of the pizza and is also the bed that all the other ingredients rest upon.  It should be rich and flavoursome but simple enough not to overpower the class of the toppings you expect to put on it.

There is nothing fancy in a tomato sauce.  It can be as simple as just tomatoes but usually a little pepping up helps the overall depth of flavour.  Firstly, do not be shy or embarrassed about using tinned tomatoes - they are your best option when making sauces like this.  But, make sure you buy the best tinned tomatoes that you can.  Pizza enthusiast the world over agree that San Marzano tinned tomatoes are the best ones, but they are hard to find.  Me, I use Napolina chopped tomatoes and they have always worked well for me and they are available everywhere.  I use the chopped ones as they are the same price and they're getting mashed anyway so a lot of the work is already done.  Cirio are also good.

The Sauce.
1 x 400g tin of tomatoes (should make enough sauce for 4 pizzas)
1/4 tsp of fresh ground black pepper (or whatever suits your taste)
1/4 tsp of salt
1/2 to 1tsp of dried oregano

That is all you need to make a perfectly good tomato sauce.  Mix all the ingredients together, mash it down a bit with a fork or at potato masher - but do not blend or blitz it.  You will make it too smooth and most likely will crush all the bitter seeds.  You want a bit of a lumpy texture to this anyway.  Leave it in a covered dish in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavours develop and that's it done.

Note - if you are cooking your pizza in a wood-fired over, then there is no real need to cook the sauce first as wood-fired ovens are so hot they cook the sauce on the pizza (but sometimes I do).  However, if you are cooking the pizza in a regular oven (on a pizza stone) then you may want to cook the sauce through.  This thickens it a bit as well.  Once cooked, put into a covered dish and let it sit to cool and then store in the fridge till required.

Optionally for the sauce you can add any of the following:
1 tbsp of fresh, torn up (not chopped) basil leaves
Some very finely chopped or grated garlic to taste
A large splash of red wine vinegar
1tbsp of good olive oil

There you have it.  Perfect pizza sauce without that store-bought stink you get from sauce in a jar.

Ciao and enjoy.

Coming soon - dressing a pizza and cooking them to perfection.  In the meantime, here's a sampler to get you in the mood :-)