Pizza Sauce
Pizza sauce is important. No, seriously. This is really important. You can't mess around with this. You can't get something in a can from the grocery store. You can't buy something in a jar. You must make it yourself. And it's not that hard.
Consider this, you're making dinner and it only calls for 4 ingredients - dough, sauce, cheese and basil. Would you scrimp on the basil? No. Of course not. You would use the best basil you can find. Why would you mess with the sauce then? You wouldn't...you shouldn't...and you won't after reading this.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups drained Canned Tomatoes (preferably San Marzano) crushed by hand or through a food mill
1/2 white onion
1 tablespoon of Extra-virgin Olive Oil
1 teaspoon Kosher Salt
1/2 teaspoon Dried Oregano (preferably Sicilian on the branch)
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
3 peeled Garlic Cloves
1 Bay Leaf
Let's start by dicing 1/2 of a white onion. And while you're at it...just look at those wonderful knife skills.
Sauté the chopped onion in a pan with a tablespoon of olive oil (more or less). We're just looking for the onions to sweat a bit, not brown too much.
Once the onions are sweated, add in the tomatoes, squeezing them as much as you can. If you have a food mill, run them through that instead. But if you don't have a food mill (what you don't make your own baby food anymore?) using your hands is perfectly acceptable. Squish the whole tomatoes just a bit, after they've been cooked they'll break down some more.
Add the remaining spices and bring everything to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 30 minutes. Just look at that color, so much better than store bought.
Remove the bay leaves and pour the sauce into the blender before running it for a quick minute. This should help create a smooth texture. Once done, you can store the sauce in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks, but who is going to do that? I would suggest you immediately throw that on some fresh dough and start making pizzas.
In tomorrow's post, we put our dough, sauce and a few more ingredients together to make a pizza! Wait for our post or not...either way, let us see what you've made!