Your Guide to Making the Best Pizza Sauce

Alongside the pizza crust, pizza sauce makes up the foundation for your pizza. Not only can a bland sauce lead to lackluster pizza, but the amount matters as well.

Too much sauce, and you'll make your crust soggy. Too little sauce and your pizza will be dry and bland.

But with the right amount of sauce--and the right flavor--your pizza will sing! Your sauce will be robust, rich, and flavorful, and the slight acidity will balance out the richness of the cheese that follows. Even your toppings can be enhanced by a great sauce.

That's why we're going to give you our tips for making the best pizza sauce at home, so that you can serve a more authentic pizza to your friends and family.

There are many rewards to making your own pizza sauce instead of relying on the pre-made pizza sauce that comes in a jar, and the difference starts with the quality.

You see, those jarred sauces tend to use cheap, flavorless tomatoes picked well before the peak of freshness. Those types of pizza sauce are also often laden with sugar, excess salt, processed oils, and other artificial ingredients that not only impact the nutritional value but also impact the taste.

If you're wanting to create a better pizza sauce, you have to start with better ingredients.

Now, the ideal sauce would involve using only fresh tomatoes, but, let's face it, that could get expensive. After all, it takes a lot of tomatoes to make a sauce, and that's if you can find tomatoes at the peak of ripeness instead of the bland, mealy tomatoes currently found in most grocery stores.

It is perfectly fine to start with canned tomatoes, but just make sure you pick a quality canned tomato sauce. The New York Times wrote a great article after taste-tasting several common canned sauce varieties, so check that out to find a high-quality brand available near you.

When picking out a canned tomato to use as your base, we recommend using pulpa rustica. Pulpa rustica lands in between pulpa--which is a lightly processed tomato--and the more processed and concentrated passata.

We've found that choosing pulpa rustica adds more of the flavor and characteristics that you would expect to find on a true Italian pizza.

While picking the right canned tomato sauce to use as your base makes a big difference as to how your sauce turns out, the rest of the ingredients make as big of a difference.

This is why we recommend using fresh ingredients--like fresh-chopped garlic--instead of pre-ground ones. While powdered garlic has its place in every kitchen, fresh garlic will take your sauce to the next level. Using fresh ground pepper and sea salt will make a difference as well.

After that, there are many schools of thought about whether or not you need to use fresh herbs while making pizza sauce.

If you're planning to make a big batch of pizza sauce with plans to freeze the leftovers, we'd recommend using (high-quality) dried herbs to make your sauce. The texture of fresh herbs doesn't always hold up well during freezing, and you won't notice as much of a flavor difference after it's defrosted.

However, if you're only making a small batch of sauce to use that day, by all means splurge for the fresh herbs, at least when it comes to basil. Dried oregano is really fine in either case, but using fresh basil can definitely make a distinctive difference.

Even better, you can use some of the leftover basil leaves for a pretty (and pretty tasty) garnish!

Finally, when sauteing your garlic and other seasonings, make sure you use high-quality, pure extra virgin olive oil. A high quality oil will enhance the flavor, while a cheap oil can muddle the flavors.

From there, the options are endless! You can add crushed pepper flakes to give your sauce a little kick, or add any of your other favorite herbs to make your sauce a true one-of-a-kind.

Once your sauce is cooled, it's time to add it to your pizza crust. You'll want about a cup of sauce for a regular size pizza. This way, you'll get the full, rich tomato flavor without leaving yourself with a soggy crust!

We hope this article will help you make the most delicious pizza sauce you've ever made. And if you're looking to make a great pizza crust, look no further than our article on how to choose the best flour for your pizza crust!

Additionally, if you're a business owner looking to serve delicious, fresh-baked pizza to your customers, Donna Italia is committed to helping you reach that goal. We recommend learning more about the benefits of a Donna Italia pizza subscription. Then, find out what other extras are included when you sign up for one of our pizza plans!