Pizza sauce made from fresh tomatoes

<p>The thing that separates a good homemade pizza from a merely acceptable one is almost never the dough or the cheese. It is the sauce. A jar of passata splashed straight onto a base tastes raw and thin, no matter how hot your oven runs, because it has never had the chance to cook down and concentrate. This is a sauce that has. It simmers for a full hour until the tomatoes collapse and their liquid reduces to something glossy and deep, and it carries one small twist that most tomato sauces skip: a knob of butter fried with the garlic before anything else goes in, which rounds off the acidity and gives the whole thing a savoury weight.</p> <p>You do not need San Marzano tomatoes grown on the slopes of Vesuvius to make this work, though they are lovely if you can find them. Any ripe, flavourful tomato will do, as long as it actually tastes of something. The real trick is time and patience, not provenance.</p> <div class="recipe-card" id="recipe"> <div class="recipe-card-head"><p class="recipe-card-title">Pizza sauce made from fresh tomatoes</p> <div class="recipe-card-actions"><a class="recipe-pin" href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description%3dPizza%2bsauce%2bmade%2bfrom%2bfresh%2btomatoes%26media%3dhttps%253A%252F%252Fmedia.vo.rs%252Ftomatoes_0.jpg%26url%3dhttps%253A%252F%252Fvo.rs%252Fstory%252Fpizza-sauce-made-from-fresh-tomatoes%252F" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" aria-label="Save to Pinterest"><i class="fab fa-pinterest-p fa-fw"></i>&nbsp;Save</a><button type="button" class="recipe-print" onclick="window.print()" aria-label="Print recipe"><i class="fas fa-print fa-fw"></i>&nbsp;Print</button> </div> </div> <div class="recipe-meta"><span class="recipe-meta-item"><span class="recipe-meta-label">Serves</span>Enough for 4 pizzas</span><span class="recipe-meta-item"><span class="recipe-meta-label">Prep</span>15 min</span><span class="recipe-meta-item"><span class="recipe-meta-label">Cook</span>60 min</span><span class="recipe-meta-item"><span class="recipe-meta-label">Cuisine</span>Italian</span><span class="recipe-meta-item"><span class="recipe-meta-label">Course</span>Sauce</span></div> <div class="recipe-cols"> <div class="recipe-ingredients"> <h3>Ingredients</h3> <ul><li>1.5 kg ripe fresh tomatoes</li><li>4 cloves garlic, finely chopped</li><li>25 g unsalted butter</li><li>2 tablespoons olive oil</li><li>4 small yellow onions, finely chopped</li><li>4 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped</li><li>4 tablespoons fresh oregano, chopped</li><li>2 tablespoons white wine vinegar</li><li>2 teaspoons fine salt</li><li>1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper</li></ul> </div> <div class="recipe-method"> <h3>Method</h3> <ol><li>Score a small cross in the base of each tomato, cover with boiling water for 60 seconds, then peel and chop coarsely.</li><li>Melt the 25 g butter with the 2 tablespoons olive oil in a wide pan over a medium-high heat.</li><li>Add the chopped garlic and herbs and fry for 2 minutes, stirring, until fragrant.</li><li>Add the chopped onions with 1 teaspoon of the salt and the pepper, and cook for 5 minutes until softening.</li><li>Pour in the 2 tablespoons vinegar, let it sizzle for 30 seconds, then add the tomatoes.</li><li>Bring to a boil, then simmer uncovered over a low heat for 1 hour, stirring now and then, until thick.</li><li>Season with the remaining salt to taste, cool for 10 minutes, then blend smooth with a stick blender.</li></ol> </div> </div> </div><h2 id="why-fresh-tomatoes-and-where-this-sauce-comes-from">Why fresh tomatoes, and where this sauce comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement"> <span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span> <ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center" data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946" data-ad-slot="3291553914" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins> <script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script> </div> <p>Tomatoes are not native to Italy at all. They arrived in Europe from Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, brought back by Spanish explorers, and for a long time they were grown as ornamental curiosities and eyed with deep suspicion, half-believed to be poisonous because they belong to the nightshade family. It was in Naples, among the poor of a crowded port city, that the tomato finally became food rather than decoration. By the late eighteenth century Neapolitan cooks were spreading crushed tomatoes on flatbread, and the pizza we recognise today began to take shape. The famous pizza Margherita, its red sauce, white mozzarella and green basil echoing the Italian flag, is credited to the Naples pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito in 1889, made in honour of Queen Margherita of Savoy.</p> <p>That lineage matters here because it tells you what the sauce is supposed to be: simple, direct, and made from good tomatoes cooked with restraint. There is no place in it for a long list of dried herbs and sugar. When you use fresh tomatoes you take control of two things a tin cannot give you, sweetness and acidity, and you keep out the extra salt and stabilisers that canned sauces so often carry. The trade-off is honest work. You peel, you chop, and you wait an hour by the hob. If your tomatoes are underripe and watery, the sauce will taste thin however long you cook it, so buy the reddest, softest, most fragrant ones you can find, ideally a plum variety with less water and more flesh.</p> <h2 id="choosing-your-tomatoes">Choosing your tomatoes</h2> <p>Not all tomatoes make good sauce, and the difference shows up sharply once they have simmered down. The best choice is a plum or Roma variety: they have thick, meaty walls, relatively few seeds and less watery jelly, which means more flavour and less time spent boiling off liquid. Big round salad tomatoes will work, but they hold more water and give a thinner result, so expect to simmer them longer. Whatever type you buy, ripeness beats variety every time. A pale, firm supermarket tomato picked green and gassed to redness has almost no flavour to concentrate, so the sauce ends up tasting of little but acid. Look for tomatoes that are deep red right through, feel heavy for their size, give slightly under a gentle press and smell fragrant at the stem end. In the depths of winter, when good fresh tomatoes simply do not exist, this is the one honest case for reaching instead for a tin of good whole plum tomatoes, which are picked and canned at the height of ripeness and will beat a poor fresh tomato hands down.</p> <h2 id="peeling-the-tomatoes">Peeling the tomatoes</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement"> <span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span> <ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center" data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946" data-ad-slot="3291553914" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins> <script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script> </div> <p>Score a shallow cross in the base of each tomato with a small sharp knife, cutting only through the skin. Sit them in a heatproof bowl, pour over freshly boiled water to cover, and leave them for 60 seconds, no longer. The heat loosens the skin from the flesh without cooking the tomato. Drain, and the skins will slip away from the cross you cut, peeling back in neat curls. Chop the peeled tomatoes coarsely; they do not need to be neat, since you will blend the sauce at the end. Skinning matters because tomato skin never softens in cooking and blends into unpleasant little papery flecks that catch on the tongue.</p> <h2 id="building-the-flavour">Building the flavour</h2> <p>Melt the 25 g butter with the 2 tablespoons olive oil in a wide, heavy pan over a medium-high heat. The oil raises the smoke point of the butter so it browns rather than burns, and the butter is the quiet twist that makes this sauce taste richer than the sum of its parts. As soon as the butter foams, add the 4 chopped garlic cloves and both chopped herbs and fry for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. You want the garlic to soften and turn fragrant but on no account to brown, because burnt garlic turns bitter and there is no rescuing it once it does.</p> <p>Add the 4 finely chopped onions with 1 teaspoon of the salt and the teaspoon of pepper, and cook for about 5 minutes until they turn soft and translucent. Salting them now draws out their moisture and starts them sweetening. Pour in the 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar and let it bubble and largely cook away for 30 seconds; this small hit of acid brightens the finished sauce and stops the long simmer tasting flat and jammy.</p> <p>Now tip in the chopped tomatoes, bring everything up to a boil, then drop the heat to a bare simmer. Cook uncovered for a full hour, stirring occasionally to stop the base catching. Leaving the lid off is not optional: the whole point of the hour is to let water evaporate so the flavour concentrates and the texture thickens. By the end the sauce should mound softly on a spoon rather than run off it. Taste, add the remaining salt as needed, and let it cool for 10 minutes before blending smooth with a stick blender. Cooling first stops hot sauce erupting up the sides of the pan.</p> <p>A note on the herbs, because their timing here is deliberate. I add the basil and oregano early, frying them in the butter with the garlic, rather than stirring them in at the end. Cooking dried or robust fresh oregano into the fat draws out its warm, peppery character and lets it infuse the whole sauce over the hour, which is exactly what you want for a cooked pizza base that will go into a hot oven. Basil is more fragile and its fresh, aniseed lift does fade with long cooking, so if you want that bright note as well as the deep one, hold back a tablespoon of chopped basil and stir it through after blending, off the heat. Whether to blend at all is a matter of taste: for a smooth, spreadable pizza sauce I blend it completely, but if you prefer a rustic, chunky sauce for pasta or dipping, skip the blender and simply crush the softened tomatoes against the side of the pan with a spoon.</p> <h2 id="what-can-go-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it">What can go wrong, and how to fix it</h2> <p>If the finished sauce tastes flat or watery, it almost always means it has not reduced enough; return it to the heat and simmer another 15 to 20 minutes. If it tastes sharp and green, your tomatoes were underripe, and a pinch of sugar (start with half a teaspoon) will balance the acidity without making it sweet. If it has caught and tastes faintly of scorch, do not stir the burnt layer up from the bottom; pour the good sauce off the top into a clean pan and leave the dark base behind. Too thick after blending? Loosen it with a tablespoon of water at a time. Too loose? It simmers down happily.</p> <h2 id="storage-make-ahead-and-using-it-up">Storage, make-ahead and using it up</h2> <p>This sauce keeps in a sealed jar in the fridge for up to 5 days, and it freezes beautifully. Freeze it in small tubs or an ice-cube tray so you can pull out just enough for one pizza at a time; a batch this size will sauce far more than a single night&rsquo;s baking. It thaws in an hour at room temperature or gently in a pan.</p> <p>Spread it thinly on a base, no more than a couple of tablespoons per pizza, because a flooded base steams rather than crisps. It is the natural partner to a good homemade base, and it pairs perfectly with my <a href="/story/pizza-dough-easy-to-prepare/">easy pizza dough</a>. Beyond pizza it is a fast weeknight pasta sauce, loosened with a splash of the cooking water, or a dip for warm bread. For a change of direction, stir a spoonful of it through the filling when you make <a href="/story/chicken-enchiladas/">chicken enchiladas</a> for an easy, tomatoey backbone. A small grated carrot dropped in with the onions sweetens the sauce naturally without added sugar, and a splash of red wine in place of the vinegar gives a darker, more grown-up depth if you are cooking for a crowd.</p>