Because pizza is such a simple dish it’s all about the quality of the ingredients you use and I think we can agree that the dough, the sauce, and the cheese are key so here’s our best pizza sauce recipe.
Pizza sauce ingredients
You only need simple ingredients for this easy pizza sauce recipe:
- Peeled Plum Tomatoes (400g tin)
- Tomato Puree (2 tablespoons)
- Fresh Basil (handful)
- Garlic (1 or 2 cloves)
- Seasoning
You don’t want your sauce to be too watery so that’s why we chose plummed tomatoes over chopped tomatoes. You will get a much better product, less water, and they’re around the same price too so there’s no argument.
The tomato puree will add some thickness to your sauce and also add some extra punchy concentrated tomato flavor.
Fresh basil is there to add flavor, as is the garlic and some seasoning.
Blend your sauce together
This is the super simple part and just needs all the ingredients added to an electric blender. All the ingredients are fresh so you can give it a taste if you want, but you honestly don’t need to as it will taste great on your pizza.
No need to cook it
Some recipes say you should now cook this recipe but why would you need to do that? You’re going to be putting the pizza in a super hot pizza oven and that sauce will cook in there, so in essence, you’d be cooking it twice which is overdoing it.
The only reason you may do this is to reduce the sauce and make it thicker, but you won’t need to do that with this easy pizza sauce recipe.
Using the sauce
When cooking in a wood-fired or gas-fired pizza oven you need to resist the urge to overload your pizza base with too much sauce, cheese, and toppings.
The idea is to cook the pizza in a quick time, and wet and heavy topping will restrict the rise of the dough, so don’t put too much sauce on and you’ll be fine. This sauce recipe has plenty of flavor so you won’t miss out on anything.
Shop bought sauce alternatives
It really doesn’t take long to make the recipe above, but if you really want to make things easy then you can buy shop-bought pizza sauce.
As we mentioned earlier in this article, it’s all about quality ingredients, and sadly some pre-made sauces will be artificially sweetened or have thickeners added. This is something we want to avoid. We enjoy a sugar free pizza sauce.
A tinned sauce that comes highly rated is from Mutti, which is Italy’s #1 tomato brand and is made with sun-ripened 100% Italian tomatoes, basil, oregano, and a pinch of salt.
It’s great that it uses simple ingredients and is one of the best canned sauces out there, but personally we found it slightly watery than we’d like, but not enough to put us off.
The only thing that did put us off was the price, with the Muti Pizza Sauce Classica costing a fair chunk more than the ingredients for our recipe.
If you’re struggling with time then pre-made sauce is an okay alternative but we really would recommend taking a few minutes out of your day to make your own sauce. If you don’t have fresh basil then simply remove it from our recipe and you will still have an amazing fresh sauce to go with our slow proof dough recipe.
