Pizza Sauce: New Recipe!

Why pizza sauce? Why not tomato sauce, or pasta sauce, or marinara? I suppose because pizza is the main thing I use it for! Spaghetti sometimes, or ravoli, or lasagna. Well, sometimes with gnocchi and meatballs, but mostly on pizza. And this year, I’m using my new recipe. 

You may recall that last year, after I purchased my power blender, I discovered fresh tomato sauce. Until then, I didn’t know that a blender could pulverize the skins and seeds which would automatically thicken the sauce. My previous method called for a day of running the tomatoes through my Roma juicer and then three days or so cooking it down in my slow cooker. Then finally, the next day I could can it. So that was roughly five days worth of tomato processing and sauce making and preserving. With this method, I can get the whole thing done in an afternoon! What a savings of time! And of electricity for cooking it down. 

What I wasn’t sure about, was how well my new method would work with frozen tomatoes. I tend to toss extra tomatoes into the freezer, and after I get several full gallon bags of them, I pull them out, defrost them, drain them (saving the water), and make sauce. 

Tomato tip: Frozen tomatoes peel super easy as they defrost, meaning you don’t need gallons of boiling and ice water!

Freezing, though, tends to toughen the skins, and I wondered if that would be a problem for the texture of the sauce. I really didn’t feel like spending all day with my manual juicer though, so I decided to experiment. 

Result? No problem! All that was left was to season, heat and can it!

Liquefied thawed tomatoes.

Raw onion and fresh oregano and rosemary. I also added salt, 1/2 teaspoon to each pint jar.

Then it’s heating the sauce to a boil and water bath canning as usual.

What’s really noteworthy, is how the blender sauce looks compared to the cooked down method. 

On the left is a jar of last year’s pizza sauce, made by cooking it down for several days. On the right is the fresh blender pizza sauce.

I had some left over that didn’t quite fill the last jar, so that night we tried it on gnocchi and meatballs. No picture, but I can assure it it was delicious. The rest went onto Friday night’s pizza. I did get a photo of that!

I love that our homemade pizzas have at least some homegrown ingredients. On this one, it’s the sauce, mozzarella, and the pepper.

This method is definitely a keeper! Faster, easier, and so much tastier. The only thing I will do differently in the future, is to make sure the little stems are removed from the cherry tomatoes before I pop them into the freezer. Slicing tomatoes should be cored before freezing. Those two things will make sauce making even faster. 

I also wanted to mention the bonus by-product, i.e. the drained water from the frozen tomatoes. It’s not juice, but it’s quite tomato-ey in flavor, so I don’t waste it. Part of it went as liquid for canning black turtle beans. The rest I canned on it’s own and labeled it “tomato broth.”

Canned tomato broth