Pizza tomato sauce is not cooked
Neapolitan pizza sauce is not cooked. You crush tinned 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 commonest reason a pizza tastes of tin.
The recipe, for ten pizzas
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Whole peeled tomatoes (San Marzano or equivalent) | 800 g |
| Fine salt | 6 – 8 g |
| Fresh basil | 4 – 5 leaves, whole |
| Olive oil | At service, not in the sauce |
Crush by hand or through a food mill, never in a blender: the blades emulsify air and pulverise 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 centre 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
70 to 80 grams on a 30 cm base, spread in a spiral from the centre out, leaving two centimetres of rim. Over-saucing is the most frequent error and it shows in the bake: the middle stays pale and wet while the cornicione is already done.
What not to put in it
- Garlic and oregano. Fine on a marinara, where they are the point. In the 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.
- Passata. Already cooked, already thin. 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 fridge in a covered container and comes out in service-sized amounts rather than sitting warm by the oven for six hours.
Record what you actually use per service for a fortnight and you will stop both running out at nine o'clock and throwing away two litres on a Sunday.