Random Slice Wednesday: How to make a great pizza sauce that makes purists angry.

[RANDOM SLICE WEDNESDAYS appears whenever I feel like it--as long as it's a Wednesday. I realize this is two Wednesdays in a row now. Please don't get used to it.]

I was reading something this morning, and it seemed like a good idea for Random Slice Wednesday. It’s from a book I’m writing. I’d planned on publishing the book about 8 weeks ago because hey—it would be such a quick and easy one. (Still writing it.)
 
The book is about an easy and controversial way of making pizza. The passage regards a controversy with sauce, as my own method is controversial in Pizza World. I am one of those heretics known to [GASP!] cook my sauce. Pizza snobs regard me with disdain. I don’t care. You don’t have to care, either. You also don’t have to follow their rules.

Food snobbery is an unattractive quality. When applied to pizza, it’s just silly. Pizza prescriptivists and purists have all kinds of rules—often without having any idea what the basis for the rules really are.
 
Instead of cooking your sauce, you’re supposed to take whole tomatoes only straight from the can, break them up, add a little salt, and put them directly on the pizza. Don’t cook them!
 
News flash: tomatoes in a can have been cooked.
 
Cooking is how canning works. Virtually nothing coming out of a can is uncooked.
 
Canning was invented in the 1800s. A French brewer named Nicolas Appert noticed that food cooked inside a jar didn’t spoil unless the seals leaked. So really, cooking is the foundation of canning. It requires temperatures above the boiling point to prevent botulism.
 
Tomatoes can be canned using one of two processes, either a lower-heat process or a higher-heat process. But either way: heat is involved. Heat is the foundation of cooking and part of its definition.
 
Now, to really mess with the purists, canning is also a “process.” So canned tomatoes are [GASP!] PROCESSED FOOD! All kinds of things about which to get upset! The horror!
 
Canning and cooking and processing, oh my!
 
In using cooked tomatoes from the can, my own method requires cooking them a little bit more. The reason is simple: reducing the amount of moisture for bigger flavor. Plus, it’s just an expectation that most Americans have of their pizza.
 
The Pizza Purist has an idea that there is a holy grail of pizza as defined by the Neapolitan pizza elite. And one of the rules requires taking only DOP San Marzano tomatoes straight from the can and using them only as God intended canned tomatoes to be used: with no further cooking and only a little salt.
 
Irony aside, that’s all fine. But it’s not the way Americans learn to pizza. Especially if your reference standard is New York-style pizza, you’re used to a bigger, bolder sauce that’s been cooked with other ingredients besides salt.
 
In cooking, we have important allies in garlic powder and onion powder. They help us punch up that flavor—more so than fresh onions and fresh garlic can. (I use tons of fresh onions. I also use a lot of fresh garlic. And I don’t fetishize garlic as some do. Although, sometimes you just need to go hog wild with the garlic. But I digress.)
 
My sauce recipe also calls for extra-virgin olive oil, black pepper, cayenne pepper and white pepper, as well as dried basil and dried oregano. This sauce also reduces for a while. Is that so wrong? (Of course not.)
 
And a tomato that already has big flavor can stand up to the apparent sacrilege I am committing. 
 
I will admit that I used to have a heavy hand with herbs and spices. In recent years, I’ve backed off that. Part of it comes from learning to use better products that benefit from showcasing their natural flavor. But I still like a pizza sauce with punch.
 
What do you like? Go crazy. It might not be “pure.” But if it has great flavor, it’s a win.
 
The above is lifted from a book I’m writing about a lazy person’s approach to making pizza. It will be out this summer (knock wood). If you’re interested in knowing when that happens, putting yourself on the mailing list ensures you’ll find out. And, you’ll regularly get silly pizza missives like this one sent to your in-box.

By the way, if you’d like the sauce recipe that I typically use, you’ll find it inside this multi-part blog post about an easy pizza way to make pizza in your home oven using an upside-down cast-iron skillet—and you’ll find it excerpted all by itself right here at "Pizza Sauce For Heretics." 
 
------
 
A lot of big-time professional artisan pizza makers once made their first pizza in a home oven just like yours. You can do it, too. My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. The book is 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. ​​