Since I started growing my own tomatoes in my raised bed garden, it has been a long time since I have bought a jarred or canned pizza sauce.  I can usually freeze enough red sauce to last me until next year’s harvest.  I find the flavor of home-made pizza sauce with my own tomatoes from my garden to be fuller bodied than traditional or jarred sauces.  Lucious Roma or San Marzano tomatoes lend to a great sauce that can be used on a Margherita, sausage, pepperoni, or supreme pizzas that I make from scratch including home made pizza dough.  I have developed 2 recipes that work well for me.  One is a quick pizza sauce that uses tomatoes and tomato paste. The other is a slow simmer sauce that takes time on the stove top to reduce into a pizza sauce consistency.  I get more sauce with the quick recipe as it does not reduce the moisture out of the tomatoes like the stove top method.  It also makes less of a mess as you don’t have spattering pizza sauce going over the stovetop when you open the lid to stir when using the stovetop method.

Best tomatoes for pizza sauce:  Roma or San Marzano tomatoes are the best.  They have less moisture content and make for a thicker sauce.

Oregano:  Most spices are quite expensive, so I grow my own oregano to use in my sauce and my husband loves to sprinkle it on top of our pizzas.  Last year I had a little 6-inch pot on my deck with my oregano plant in it, but it didn’t really produce as much oregano as I would have liked.  In the fall when I was done harvesting as much as I could from the oregano plant, I decided to transplant it into my landscape between my sedum and hardy ice plants.  He is one happy oregano plant, I have harvested from it multiple times and do nothing to it.  It gets rainwater from the heavens and nothing else.

The link to the Stove Top Recipe is:  A Tale of 2 Pizza Sauces: Act 1 – Traveling Garden Lady