Pizza sauce recipe: why the best pizza sauce is not cooked
Neapolitan pizza sauce is not cooked. You crush canned whole peeled tomatoes by hand, add salt, and that is the recipe — the cooking happens on the pizza. A sauce simmered in advance goes acidic and concentrated, and it is the single most common reason a pizza tastes of the can.
The recipe, for ten pizzas
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Whole peeled tomatoes (San Marzano or equivalent) | One 28 oz can |
| Fine salt | About 1 to 1¼ teaspoons |
| Fresh basil | 4 – 5 leaves, whole |
| Olive oil | At service, not in the sauce |
For a full service, scale by the can: a #10 foodservice can holds a little over six pounds of tomatoes, close to four 28-ounce cans, so it takes about 4 to 5 teaspoons of fine salt. Weigh that once on the scale and write the figure on the lid of the container, because teaspoons of different salts do not weigh the same.
Crush by hand or through a food mill, never in a blender: the blades whip in air and pulverize the seeds, which turns the sauce pink and bitter. Salt it, drop in the basil whole, leave it thirty minutes. Take the leaves out before service.
Should you drain it?
Partly, and it is a setting rather than a rule. Too much liquid and the center goes soggy; too little and the pizza comes out dry. Drain in a colander for about fifteen minutes and keep the juice — it is what you use to loosen a sauce that has thickened by the end of service.
How much per pizza
About 2½ to 3 ounces on a 12-inch pie, spread in a spiral from the center out, leaving three quarters of an inch of rim. On a 16-inch NY-style pie that grows to roughly 5 ounces, because the area grows with the square of the diameter. Over-saucing is the most frequent error and it shows in the bake: the middle stays pale and wet while the rim is already done.
What not to put in it
- Garlic and oregano. Fine on a marinara, where they are the point, and plenty of American slice shops season their sauce on purpose. In a Neapolitan base sauce they make every pizza on the menu taste the same.
- Sugar. A patch for acidic tomatoes. Fix the tomatoes.
- Olive oil. It goes on at service, where you can still taste it. Stirred into a sauce that then bakes, it is wasted.
- Tomato purée or paste. Already cooked, already concentrated. It is a different product for a different job.
Keeping it through service
Make it the same day. An uncooked sauce has no preservation beyond refrigeration, so it lives in the walk-in in a covered, labeled container and comes out to the make line in service-sized amounts, held at 41 °F or below, rather than sitting warm by the oven for six hours.
Record what you actually use per service for two weeks and you will stop both running out at nine o’clock and throwing away half a gallon on a Sunday.