Looking for a GREAT Pizza Sauce, Please

Find an Italian vendor in your area. By the best Italian canned tomatoes you can find. That's a start.
pan

Not necessarily. Many Italians believe that a particular kind of plumb tomato called San Marzano makes the best sauce. In Italian delis they sell them in cans clearly marked "San Marzano".

Of course, you won't be buying them at a retail store so you will have to find a distributer near you.

Before I knew better I used to throw all kinds of things into tomato sauce to enhance the flavor until I realized less is more. The tomatoes are the star of the show so they should always shine through.

Start off sauteing some chopped onion, add a little choped garlic and tomato paste. Add the canned tomotoes that you crushed in your hands to break up along with the juices. Cook it slowly until it thickens to pizza sauce consistency. In the last 10 minutes add some chopped fresh basil and adjust the seasoning. If you like your sauce spicy, add some crushed red pepper flakes as you are sauteing the onions.

Jock

Pizza Boy
A distributor like Lisanti Foods. No they are not the most expensive, but the best canned plum tomatoes you'll find. Like Jock says, good ingredients.

actually, in Italy, all the pizza i ever had was just tomatoes, nothing else, under the mozzarella. Unless it was marinara, in wh8ich case, there was garlic and parsley. Fresh basil goes on top, not cooked in the sauce - which isn;t a sauce, just tomatoes. You can slice onions on top of it, or other vegetables, but they lie on top, not boiled into the tomato. Of course, they have to taste good.

PizzaBoy,
You need to first do your homework. Just what type of pizza does your market demand. The US made pizza what it is today IMHO. I grew up on Italian pizza with tomato, spinache,etc. I'm not so sure I could get a business off the ground serving my Grandmas pizza. I have had mant pizzas using an almost paste in Italy. It all depends where you are.
pan

Look, i'm no pizza guru or anything. But most pizza's i've thought had really great tomato sauce flavor had a bit of red wine in the sauce. If it was up to me, i also might add just a bit of cilantro as an expirement.

i would say to try with adding more sugar at sauce, there is an old guy at my town, that accidentaly once time added more sugar at tomato, after that every1 in this city have tasted pizza of him, it's a bit strange combination with the cheese and the other ingredients, but many ppl liked this "sweet, different" taste ;)

tomato can
1part sugar
1/2 part salt
oregon
red wine :blush:

just a thought from a newbie cooker. :crazy:

1 can Stanislaus (sp?) 7/11 canned tomatoes
1/2 cup Extra Virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp chopped fresh garlic
2 Tbsp Oregano
1 Tbsp Sea salt
2 tsp fresh ground black pepper


Add all ingredients together in mixng bowl and mix until oil no longer seperates to top.

Store in cooler.

IMHPO Garlic is always an option on Pizza. Out of the three places I worked at as a youth in Chicago's western Suburbs two of them used it in one form or another.(Not that Chicago Pizza is the standard but... :bounce: ) Since then? Well to use or not to use .... That is a good question. It's all taste and that does change from time to time in all of us.:D

They are already peeled in the can.

When I make Pizza I almost never use a tomato sauce. I use fresh peeled, seeded and chopped tomatoes with not so much cheese that you get 2 foot long cheese strings when you are eating it. I might use a Pesto as a base or simply brush the dough with EVO before adding the tomatoes and cheese. I sprinkle a chiffonade of fresh basil over the pie as soon as it comes out of the oven so the heat releases the perfume from the herb without cooking it to death. A dusting of parmesan cheese and maybe a little fresh ground pepper and you are good to go.

But that's just me. I agree with Panini that you need to research your customer base to find out what they are looking for in a pizza. is it a gourmet special with exotic toppings or the traditional American artery clogging, everything but the kitchen sink toppings?

Jock

But, don't forget, what you like is irrelevant; it's what your customers want that counts. For example, if you live in Chicago, a NY style pizza might be a tough sell.

Jock

I think the crust is more important than the sauce, thin, thick, deep dish, etc. I like my pizza light on the sauce. For that reason Chicago style would be down on my list. I can live without a pile of chunky tomatos on my pizza.

As someone mentioned, a crust just brushed with good olive oil makes a great pizza. Alfredo, white sauce, hot sauce, anything like that can make a decent pizza, but you must have the crust, to risk a rhyme.

A great dough recipe makes even an average sauce shine. Fresh, evenly applied toppings don't hurt either. A bite of pizza should be balanced. Just my opinion, but I am very good at eating pizza. :D

However, it is important to know your market. You want to sell pizzas. That might mean an inch of sauce, two inches of cheese, and three inches of toppings piled on a cardboard circle. Like Panini said, research what they're biting on, and throw that at them.

Kevin

I like muskies, and pizza.

PizzaBoy,
I certainly hope there is a pie waiting for us when we're in your area:beer:
Did you say the franchise places were the only ones there?
Going in with a NY style is usually a good start.
Like Musky says, the crust is what NY is all about. Your really going to need a patent, 00, or something comparable to this flour. You need to work with the dough a little slack. This is also a good dough for calzones. We have good pizza joints here, believe it or not, in Tex. A place came in about a year ago with an ok pie. He also promoted the heck out of his calzones. I got to believe his business is now 50% calzone. The're great. He has smaller sizes for lunch, a multitude of ingredients in them. The only drawback was the time frame because each one is baked to order. But people got around that and he actually has a woman sitting on the phone taking orders for these. That is all she can do. I brought him a couple of cheesecakes last week and we got to chatting and he is putting out approx. 800 calzones a day. His most popular for the workers has meat, a good mexican cheese, jalapenos, etc.
I have a supply of them in my freezer. When my 15yr old has friends over they just cook em up. A lot healthier then those frozen things you buy, pockets?
pan

Search the archives. I remember going through a thread with a number of recipes. For the type of dough you want, a certain flour, or mix of flours will be necessary. There are people here far more qualified than me to give you that info.

I'm not a chef, but make a good pizza. However, I like a thin, crispy crust. I think you're looking for something a little more chewy. To me, NY style means fold it up and and take big bites.

Start practicing with a basic crust. Eating the failures should be a blast, rarely is a pizza really bad. :D

One piece of advice I have is pump as many as you can out the door. Take out, Take out, Take out. You don't need as many servers, hostesses, dishwashers, teenage employees, etc. Also serve a killer garlic bread. The simpler the menu the better, IMHO. Three or four really good items very CONSISTENTLY made is the way to go. Pizzas, garlic bread, maybe calzones, a salad with a great dressing, and a couple apps.

I ran a pizza/burger joint in the Milwaukee area in the '80s. My brother-in-laws owned it, and could never decide on what the heck they wanted to be. If I would have had my way, we would have pared the menu down considerably, and I like to think it would still be there. We sold out to a Greek family, and it is now one of about four hundred thousand gyro place/greek diners in the Milwaukee area. The food there is alright, but unique it is not. It is, however, always packed.

However, the hours I work now outside the business are much more agreeable. :D

Kevin

I like muskies.

LOL. I don't have a secret. I just use a basic dough recipe. Type "Pizza Dough" into your browser. You'll get a bunch on the first page.

Kevin

I like muskies.

Sauce

If you want to win awards for best pizza, go with a a chiffonade of fresh basil. No matter what you do, DO NOT use dried basil.

Some places use dried oregano, some don't. My suggestion- don't. The star of the show should aways be the tomatoes. The minced garlic, fresh basil and salt are just enhancers to the wondrous taste of the tomato.

Cayenne/red pepper isn't bad to add a little zing, but if you do add it, make sure it's not enough to be noticed. My gut feeling is no cayenne. There's too many people that freak out with spicy foods. Offering a shaker of red pepper flakes for those who like their pizza 'caliente' is standard pizzeria fare.

Onions have no place in NY style pizza sauce. I've eat pizza from literally hundreds of pizzerias in the NY area and none of them use onions. Pasta sauce, absolutely, pizza sauce no. Pizza and pasta sauces are two completely different animals.

Olive oil, again, no place in commercial pizza sauce. NY style pizza should be a lean. fat free dough, fat free sauce and whole milk mozzarella. All the fat should come from the cheese. The layer of fat that ends up on top of the pizza is milkfat (just typing this sentence makes my mouth water!)

There's nothing wrong with these ingredients and I'm sure they make great pizzas, but if a NY style pie is your goal, don't use them. My suggestion, test drive a pizza with them and without. If you have a mental picture of what your favorite NY style pizza tastes like, the 'without' version will come closer.

Pizza sauce should never be cooked beforehand. Cooking drives off volatile flavor compounds from the tomato. The act of baking the pizza exposes the sauce to more than enough heat. This is the reason why Neapolitans use sliced raw tomatoes- the intense radiating heat from the ceilings of their wood burning ovens (1100+ deg.) would overcook a previously cooked tomato product. Your goal is to find the freshest/brightest tasting tomato puree you can find. Puree is always seedless/skinless. No paste (paste is usually cooked more), no whole tomatoes with seeds.

To sum up, this is the ideal NY style sauce:

A superb brand of canned tomato puree
Freshly minced garlic
Chiffonade of basil
Salt
A little bit of sugar (more or less depending on the naturally changing tartness of the tomatoes)

No more, no less. This is as classic as you can get.

Lisanti is a good distributor.

Dough

Direct dough method:

Water, yeast, flour, salt into Hobart
Knead
Scale
Refrigerate

Buy fresh cake yeast in 2 lb. blocks.

Use local water. The whole 'NY style pizza needs NY water' theory is a pile of garbage. Hard water helps, but it isn't essential. Great pizza comes from great flour/great tomatoes and a hot, high thermal mass oven.

Now the flour aspect gets a little complicated. A lot of pizzerias use bromated flour. Bromate is an additive that is added to flour to create the effects of aging on the gluten. The result is a flour that creates dough with superior gluten development, which, in turn, makes better breads/pizza. Unfortunately, bromate is listed as a carcinogen. The tricky part is that when bromate is exposed to sufficient heat, it is converted to a harmless compound. The intense hot environment of pizza baking is ideal for this. What complicates things even more is that you live in CA. In CA, if bromate levels are above a particular quantity, your product has to have a label declaring the health risks.

For pizza, though, bromate is both safe AND creates the best crust imaginable. If you lived anywhere other than CA, this the only flour I'd recommend:

http://www.progressivebaker.com/prod...pringking.shtm

This is the ultimate in pizza flour. Since you are in CA, you're going to have comprise. Progressive baker sells an unbromated version of the spring king called spring hearth:

http://www.progressivebaker.com/prod...inghearth.shtm

My advice would be to purchase both. Buy the spring hearth and age it a few months in a dry cool place (aging gives you a similar effect on gluten as bromates do). Combine the aged spring hearth 50/50 with brand new spring king. Diluting the bromated spring king should put you well below any residual bromate levels set by the state. At least I think it should. Look into the state laws and make sure.

Pizza Boy,

I told you there were people here very qualified to talk about differences in flour.

Good post.

Kevin

I like muskies.

PizzaBoy, all the questions you are asking are answered on this commercial pizzaria intended site:

www.encyclopizza.com


Dough
Sauces for every type of pizza
Tomato sauce/puree and best types to use
recipes
everything.

Check it out. It totally covers everything for someone wanting to run a pizza restaurant, no matter what type of pizza you are going to make. He must have over 8 different sauce recipes for NY, deep dish, thin crust, zesty, traditional, etc.

doc

Encyclopizza is one of the best pizza making sources I've come across- I learned quite a bit from it (the chemistry of tomato processing was especially enlightening), but... his sauce recipes are WAY off the mark. From the extended list of ingredients he's using, I'm absolutely certain he's never stepped foot in NYC (or the surrounding area).

There's quite a few foods, that, in the NYC area, conform to a relatively narrow yet sublime definition. As you go further from the source, though, the interpretation becomes more than a little foggy/confused. This list of foods includes:

Chinese restaurant food
Indian restaurant food
Bagels

and Pizza

try a tondori and cream base, i sell one like that in my restaurant, then but chicken, mushrooms and capsicum on it.

I don't know, I made his sweet and sassy sauce for thin crust and it came out superior to my expectations.

However, your point about NYC should also definitely apply to pastrami.

No where else in the world have I had a pastrami sandwich like the 400 Restaurant on the corner of 57th and whatever. It was just a block or so up from the Holiday Inn.

Had it other places in NYC too, and they're all pretty good. But in Minnesota?

The pastrami is putrid!...


doc

Lots of great suaucy info here:) I will try a few myself. Although I have nothing to add the question of sauce I do have a cheesy tip for you lol. The best pizza I have aver had had a combination of 70% mozzarella and 30% Provolone.

Melissa