Updated Big Batch Pizza Sauce
A More Flavorful Version Of One Of My Favorite Recipes!
Like a lot of families, we eat more than our fair share of pizza. Being a frugal and somewhat health conscious mom I try to make most of our pizza that we consume from scratch, as I feel like part of the path to overall wellness comes from limiting the amount of processed foods in one's life.
Well, and if I am being completely honest, I like to be able to make a ton of food at a fraction of the cost of buying the ready-made processed stuff. Take pizza sauce for instance. A jar of ready made pizza sauce costs around a $1.50 or more. Nine times out of ten it is loaded with sugar, and the paltry twelve ounce jar won't even cover two of my tractor tire sized pies. That said, there is something to be said about being able to crack open a jar that's ready to slap onto the pie, especially after a long day that included worming a rambunctious 4-H steer, blog upkeep, and teaching 7 subjects to my kiddos. What's a budget conscious, desiring of a larger volume of pizza sauce madre to do?
Hit the restaurant supply store!
The above can of tomato sauce costs a whopping $3.35 at my local wholesale restaurant supply store. There are 106 ounces of tomato sauce in that #10 can, and with a few cents worth of my bulk and homegrown spices, I suddenly have a huge amount of pizza sauce to utilize!
Whatever I don't use tonight to feed my horde, I just divide into containers or labeled freezer bags and toss into the freezer for future pizza nights. Talk about convenience! And instead of un-pronounceable preservatives and whatnot, we will be partaking of a sauce that not only tastes good, but is pretty whole foodish in composition.
Now, my original big batch of pizza sauce has brown sugar in it. There is something palate-magical about a bit of brown sugar in a homemade pizza sauce, but after my recent gelato and French Bakery splurge fest in Laguna Beach, I feel the need to lay off the sugar a bit, so I updated my previous recipe to make the sauce basically sugar free.
To start with, I had to find a P38 can opener to open the #10 can of tomato sauce, for my fancy pants electric can opener and hand crank model were too uppity to open a can of such girth and magnificence. Snobs.
Next, I got out a stainless still pot, splashed a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into the vessel of cookage, and proceeded to heat it up. Once nice and ready to burn me with splashes of oil fire, I tossed a couple of tablespoons of dried, minced onion and two cloves of minced garlic into the pot and cooked it for a minute. Don't take a phone call at this point or text your grandma back, it only takes seconds to go from nicely browned onions to burnt "now you gotta start over, don't curse in front of the kids" failure.
Invited to the pizza sauce ingredient party were:
Trendy but tasty Pink Himalayan Salt
Dried Italian Parsley
Dried Basil
Dried Oregano
Garlic Powder
And finally, the fun Kitchen Fairy experimental part (THAT WORKED WOO!), I wanted the brown sugar flavor without the blood sugar ramping effects, so I went with a tablespoon of Pyure, a teaspoon of liquid stevia extract, and a teaspoon of blackstrap molasses. My little faux brown sugar additive looked pathetic and like the nostril expellings of a Wooly Mammoth, but it sure did the trick, this batch of pizza sauce is my favorite yet, taste-wise, by far!
However, constructing the super easy recipe was not without tribulation, the pizza sauce likes to throw flaming hot bits of sauce lava at you when you stew it, and I now have a nice red burn on my forearm from the pot of stewing. Guess I will just get my revenge by ingesting the sultry sauce, BWAH HA HA!
Updated Big Batch Pizza Sauce
1 #10 can of tomato sauce (106 ounces)
2 Tablespoons dried Italian parsley
2 Tablespoons dried oregano
2 Tablespoons dried basil
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 Tablespoons dried minced onions
2 cloves of garlic minced
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoon erythritol/stevia blend (I used Pyure)
1 teaspoon liquid stevia extract
1 teaspoon molassesHeat olive oil in a large pan and saute dried onion and minced garlic for a minute or until brown.
Add tomato sauce, salt, garlic powder, oregano, basil, and parsley.
Next, mix together Pyure, stevia extract, and molasses. Add the mixture and stir everything to combine.
Simmer on low heat until flavors meld. I usually throw my pizza sauce mixture on the stove after lunch and let it stew until I am ready to prep dinner, but I would think that an hour would be sufficient if you are in a hurry.
Use sauce the same day for pizza crafting magnificence, or divide into pizza meal sized portions and freeze until ready to use.
Relevant end-note: I will probably be updating/adding to this recipe this summer when my tomatoes are ripe, as the only thing that makes any pizza sauce recipe better is using your own home grown tomatoes. A couple of years ago when I was invaded by a huge crop of tomatoes, I made and canned my own pints of pizza sauce, and that my friends is the most amazing way to go. Hello flavor, yum! So stay tuned for that post, probably around August or September!
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This sounds so good and I believe I can do this one. I made tomato sauce with our peels last year and canned it. I was so proud😍 last year was my first canning experience. Thank you!
With peels? Really? I must know more about this, it sounds intriguing! Canning is so much fun. Well, sometimes it is exhausting, but I always feel such a sense of accomplishment after I finishing processing a batch of something:o)
I sure hope you enjoy the sauce recipe and thank you so much for your reply!
YES! I couldn't believe how easy and how good. Save all your peels when you are canning the tomatoes. Put the skins in a heavy bottom pot. Add water just to barely cover and simmer about 30 min. Blend the skins with stick blender, regular blender, Ninja whatever you got until smooth. Add the sauce back to the pan and simmer another 30 min, cooking out all the water you can. I water bath canned mine in pint jars. So delicious. I hope you try and love it. I plan to blog on how I used all my scraps last year in the following weeks. I was amazed at some of the food I made with scraps.
OH YES! I love learning things, I am so, so going to try making sauce with my tomato peels! Thank you so much for sharing! I can't wait to read all of your other scraptastic posts! Seriously cannot wait to try this!
Awesome. I am thrilled I knew something that can help you out. Using Scraps is on my Posts List, for sure. I used Peach skins and Apple Peels for jelly and Syrup. Both turned out perfect but the syrup is really, really good.
Yummy recipe! Love the humorous undercurrent too. I am also a fan of homemade pizza sauce, the bottled ones taste like cardboard! I must say I prefer fresh garlic to the powder - I drop in whole cloves and also use canned whole tomatoes - no hot lava splashed iphones...or samsungs, burn kit can stay in the cupboard - and then mash everything when cooked :) I'm hoping you have a recipe for a crispy base?
Thank you! I so totally agree when it comes to the fresh garlic over powder! My husband had used all but two cloves of our fresh garlic on a huge batch of chow mein that he made, so I had to improvise! Mmm. I love whole cloves, and lol, do use whole tomatoes a lot, but I was feeling a bit lazy, guess I have a burn on my forearm to show for it!
As far as a crispy pizza crust goes, I have a few recipe variations that I like, the key to that is a lot of kneading and high, high heat. I have an outdoor wood fired oven that bakes up glorious pizza with the right amount of chew and crispiness, but methinks I need to share how I get that kind of crust too. You have inspired me:o)
Your comment rocked, thank you so much for dropping by!
Pizza sauce certainly is malevolent stuff. It'll burn you while you make it, and it'll burn your mouth when you dive into that first slice fresh from the oven that seems deceptively cool enough to eat.
Using a P38 on a #10 can is a good workout, I suppose. A bit lopsided though.
Pizza sauce is sort of devious for sure! I have a nice burn on my forearm and I am pretty sure that I will be regrowing the skin on the roof of my mouth for the foreseeable future. I kind of feel like you have trodden the sauce of doom path before, it appears as if you speak from experience!
The Hawaiian utilized his well honed from years in the field P38 skills for me, I felt adored!
I love to make homemade pizza! I will have to try your recipe!
Thanks for sharing!
Ooh! It is so good to hear from you! I bet your homemade pizza is awesome!:o) Hope you enjoy the sauce!
@generikat.I am loving your budget pizza sauce.But yours is pact full of goodness and herby delights.I cant believe you use my method of brown sugar.I honestly thought no one new about that.That has been the biggest secret other then the colonel Sanders fried chicken recipe😂 .When i make my spaghetti bolognese i always use a touch of brown sugar.Really brings out the sweetness and tang in the tomotoes.Im loving your step by step guide👍🏼🍕
Awesome! A fellow brown sugar user! LOL! We also sometimes put a pinch of cinnamon and a dash of whole cream in our bolognese, really it just depends on our mood, but the brown sugar (or freaky weird imitation) is a must:o)
Thank you so much for your awesome comment, I love your replies!
At generikat dont worry.Brown sugar is just white sugar with molasses in it.It does actually have more nutrients then normal white sugar.Soooo our secret tastes even better now no imitations😉! You can sleep better at night knowing that! Bless you glad you like my comments.Ooops originally was going to post ( NICE POST)😂😂😂😂 But you deserve more then a bot response though im practically one with my robotic missions to carry out in the day!!! Just call me Arnie🤖
Love homemade pizza sauces. But why not use real tomatoes instead of canned. We gave up canned tomatoes about 7 years ago and tomato sauces taste so good now. Before I never was a huge fan. Ohh btw pumpkin puree is also a great pizza sauce. We just love it!
Oh pumpkin pizza sauce yum! With sage and walnuts, argh! I'm dying!
If I had the choice to use only fresh tomatoes for my sauce I would! Here in the frozen, northern waste our fresh tomato options are limited to tasteless nitrogen tomatoes from thousands of miles away for half the year, so canned happens. Don't worry though, I make up for it when they are in season, and this year I'm going to finally experiment with throwing them in the freezer when they ripen and using them as I go:)
You are so lucky😊
Ohh that's too bad... never lived that far up north to be without tomatoes. Big warm tropical hug and the pumpkin sauce is so good indeed ;)
MMm that crust looks yummy! I had no idea pizza sauce was so easy to make. We love our pizza here and would love to make it from scratch. The one time I did try making our own, it pretty much cost us the same as a frozen one. But I bought everything prepare, sauce, dough etc, so I’m sure that’s why.
Ha ha! I totally have a pizza ingestion problem, lol! Good to hear I'm not alone!
I think the most expensive thing I put on my pizza would be the cheese and toppings as the sauce and dough I make from scratch, and since I buy everything in bulk the cost of those two things is pretty marginal.
I hope to soon see a blog post about your pizza making adventures, that would be awesome😊
Can't lie...I have a weak spot for a good pizza. :D
Ha ha! I totally have that problem too! Hmm, I suppose this post, among others, kinda makes that obvious, but redundancy is good, especially when it comes to pepperoni.😜
Mmmmmmpepperoni
The sauce looks amazing with all the herbs and garlic:)
It was kind of torture to be in my house this afternoon, I let that sauce simmer for about 5 hours, and magically children from all over the neighborhood started appearing in my kitchen, lol!
Thank you for your lovely comment!
Magic sauce:)
Looks tasty!
Well thank you kindly good sir!😊