From the Dept. Of Fun & Functionality: Is this the best wrong way to freeze pizza sauce?

Today is a special day. This edition of your Saturday Afternoon Pizza Post is both mercifully short and intensely useful. So much so, in fact, that your head will spin off its carriage bolt and land squarely in a bowl of pizza sauce.
 
Spin! Splash! Sploot! Mop!
 
If you’re a confirmed bachelor, you’ll find this tip to be genius.
 
If you’re an accomplished domestic engineering professional, you might wonder what’s wrong with me. Why did it take me over 20 years of making pizza to figure out this self-evident tidbit?
​

Welcome to my world. It’s a non-stop party of pizza thinking without always focusing on pizza-component storage.
 
For example, it’s taken me three and a half solid years of hating the space in my limited, Seven Dwarves-brand kitchen cabinets where I was storing my cooling racks to decide that the racks should live in the pantry, hanging flat against the wall on one-penny nails.
 
Genius!
 
Anyway, today’s tip solves one of my ongoing challenges with making pizza sauce, to wit: the best way to freeze the unused sauce.
 
If you’re an impatient squirrel who thrives on the time-deficit lifestyle, you can scroll to the bottom line and read that. But I guarantee you, it’s not gonna be as much fun as slogging through the backstory with me.
 
And if you’re the kind of raging A-type who says, “What?! A 72-hour cold ferment? I don’t have the time for that!” Well, I would pray for your soul. But I don’t have the time for that. (Kidding. I just did it. Right between the two previous sentences.)
 
 
So, when pizza sauce meets storage containers and you freeze it, it yields something unwieldy. 

You end up with a big, frozen chunk of sauce at which it is not convenient to hack away using a cleaver, delivering random-sized chunks of frozen tomato matter onto the kitchen counters and skittering across the floor surfaces while simultaneously filling the air with tiny bits of frozen tomato spray.
 
A-plus for spectacle. F-minus for portion control.
 
Smaller containers of pre-portioned amounts would be good, but my freezer is small and I don’t have the kind of room. (I used to have a freezer big enough for a dozen whole turkeys and a love seat. Sadly, that was another time and place.)
 
Flat freezer bags of pre-weighed quantities would possess a better form factor, but how many plastic bags do you really want to be using in this day of microplastic hyper-consciousness?
 
YOU CAN SKIP THIS PART. Not long ago, I had a group of friends giving me grief for buying a mammoth package of bottled water from Walmart. You know the kind. It’s one of those endless party packs that’s so huge that when you pick it up it creaks and squeaks and the sound of flimsy plastic on plastic makes your teeth curl. All these friends demanded to know, “Why are you introducing all that plastic into the environment?” I did not bother to point out I had walked into a big-box “environment” and merely moved a quantity of already existing plastic bottles to a different part of the "environment." I did not manufacture them out of raw petroleum. They were already “in the environment” whether we liked it or not. The only environmentally responsible thing I could do about them was a) buy them myself, and then b) dispose of the bereft empties in a manner that would guarantee they did not become part of a floating soup of plastic crap congregating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. ("Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.") But I digress.
 
 
So, to assuage my supposed guilt for using disposable plastics, I avoid excessive use of zippered plastic storage bags. Besides, as easy as it is pour a bunch of sauce inside a bag and let it freeze flat, there’s still the issue of portioning. If you put a mass of sauce into a single bag, you still have to break pieces off the frozen flat, which invariably end up, once again, skittering across the floor tiles like bloody little hockey pucks.
 
The solution was revealed to me by the good graces of The Algorithm Almighty.
 
I was thumbing through the Walmart app in search of some organic produce (how’s that for irony?) when The Algorithm presented me with an inexplicable choice: a pair of silicone trays for making giant ice cubes.
 
Yes, the giant, 2-inch ice cube is great for a slower, more controlled chill in your hundred-bucks-a-pour Pappy Van Winkle 57-year-old, cracker-barrel-aged bourbon.
 
But looking at the tray, ice cubes are not what I saw.
 
What I saw was a way to freeze pre-portioned quantities of pizza sauce.

​ABOVE: The first 75-gram cube resulting from my ice tray experiment. Note the beveled edges. That's because the cube is placed upside down for maximum visual appeal. 

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Understand, I’ve lately been making endless test recipes for my new book, The Lazy Way To Pizza.
 
And if portion control sounds not lazy but fastidious, allow me to point out this: if you’re lazy, there’s no approach to perfection more brainless than just weighing stuff.
 
You get the portions right without thinking about it.
 
Anyway, I’ve been making one pizza after another, each requiring a 75-gram portion of sauce.

ABOVE: The ice cube tray, with a resulting block of pizza sauce ice in a Pyrex custard cup (one of the products I recommend for setting up your mise en place when making pizzas. Note the ice crystals. This is not freezer burn (yet). Crystallization is inevitable unless you are able to eliminate air from the storage space. I'm still working on that. But as long as you use the cubes within a reasonable amount of time, they'll be OK. And be sure to put your ice tray inside a plastic bag unless it comes with a cover. 


​Do you have any idea how delightfully and blithely brainless you get to be when you’ve got a dozen 75-gram cubes of freezer sauce at your disposal?
 
“Hand me one of those pre-measured, 75-gram hockey pucks of sauce, please! Cocktail?”
 
One of the things I love about the Lazy Way pizza is there’s virtually no mess to clean up. And now, having no need to measure sauce when making the next pizza makes me beyond blissfully indifferent.
 
BOTTOM LINE (if you’re that person described at the top of this nonsense): Think about getting silicone ice cube trays for giant ice cubes. They’re great for freezing pre-weighed quantities of pizza sauce. Just be sure to cover the tray or put it inside a plastic bag. You’ll be glad you did it.
 
If you don’t know the kind of ice cube trays of which I speak, you can see some here at Amazon. (Yes, this is an affiliate link. If you order, Amazon will pay me a commission at no additional cost to you. But if you buy, I don’t expect that the three cents or so paid to me by Amazon will change my life. I just like to see clicks. If you want this product, you can go pick up something similar at Walmart like I did. Except the Walmart ice trays I bought cost about a buck more and didn’t come with lids, which would have been convenient. I have to put my ice trays inside plastic bags. I did not think this through 100%. But I still have two-inch cubes of frozen pizza sauce with which I can play hockey on the kitchen floor. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what counts?)
 
Cheers. The Department of Fun & Functionality toasts your continued life successes through pizza.  
 
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I live in a house full of pizza. There is so much pizza coming from my home oven that we finally had to enact a moratorium while we catch our breaths and eat a few carrots. Would you like to be so prolific with pizza? My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. It's less a cookbook than an entertaining guidebook about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions and has links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here. ​