There are so many choices on the sauce front the days. It’s not unusual to find barbeque or curry sauce options on takeaway menus on top of the traditional plain tomato that we know and came to love. Most of the other options would leave the Italians scowling, but the choice is yours!
Within this post I’ll be explaining how to make the more traditional options – a tomato base and a white sauce base. The even better news? They’re both so quick to make and involve absolutely no cooking whatsoever!
Tomato Sauce
1. Keeping it simple - a tin of San Marzano tomatoes
For a true Neapolitan pizza, it has to be made with a base of just San Marzano tomatoes. Nothing else, that’s it. When decanting the tomatoes from a tin you may find there are still lumps or even whole tomatoes in there. Just give them a firm squeeze in your hands, or finely chop up with a knife if you wish.
Of course the locals have the luxury of having access to these fresh, but they are known for retaining fantastic flavour once canned for those us living further away.
It can be hard to source these in UK supermarkets but they are easy to find on amazon and online Italian food wholesalers so have a shop around. Make sure the cans you buy are “D.O.P.” marked. D.O.P stands for Denominazione di Origine Protetta, translating to English as Protected Designation of Origin. This ensures that you are buying the genuine product from it’s specific origin in Italy. It protects food products from copycats elsewhere in a similar fashion to that of Champagne etc.
San Marzano tomatoes are a variant of plum tomatoes so if you want to try a more readily available can of plum tomatoes in supermarkets and see how it turns out then give it a go!
2. Tarting up your tomatoes
Not quite as traditional, but still using just a handful of ingredients. Again you’re going to need some tinned chopped tomatoes, as well as some grated / minced fresh garlic cloves and some chopped up fresh basil.
Try and stick to fresh ingredients for the tomato sauce. Don’t be fooled by the little jars of ‘Mixed Italian Herbs’. These definitely don’t belong in pizza sauce.
3. Ready-made sauce
These are always good to have in the cupboard. When I first started pizza making I came across tins of Mutti Pizza Sauce. It’s essentially a tin of chopped tomatoes and also has a small amount of basil and oregano within it. It’s really tasty, a nice consistency to work with and gave me a lot of time to focus on experimenting with dough and ingredients before getting dragged in to recipes for sauces… And I’m glad I never ever got drawn in to that and stuck with simplicity instead.
The Mutti range are great quality products. In terms of cost, they are a far more expensive alternative to options 1 or 2 with each 400g tin coming in at over £2 and it’s more than achievable to get a pack of 4 tins of chopped tomatoes in a supermarket for less.
White (Bianca) Sauce
I love a pizza with a white base. This has come about only in the last 5 years or so and like most great food discoveries, I came across it overseas.
Background
Feeling a bit rough from a nigh out on holiday in Spain, we took a walk and stopped by a pizza restaurant along the coast. I couldn’t get past the intrigue from the ‘carbonara’ pizza option on the menu – a white sauce base with mushrooms, ham, topped off with an egg and sprinkle of parsley. After tasting that I never looked back and whenever hosting a pizza night now I’ll always make sure there’s a white option up see what others think of it as well.
The Effort...
I tried a number of different sauces to try and make it work and it all just seemed like too much effort and it didn’t quite live up to expectations. I’d used a homemade bechamel sauce followed by a bechamel with added cheese but it wasn’t quite right.
Keen to get it right, I continued experimenting but used cheat packet white sauces and cheese sauces but again it just wasn’t quite there.
Checking out what was in the fridge one day and thinking outside the box (and tempted by trying an even simpler and lazier approach) I decided to play around with an unopened tub of mascarpone cheese and after a further couple of experiments with this I finally had something I was happy with!
The Final Method
One 250g tub of mascarpone will do approximately three 12″ pizzas, depending on how thick you like it of course.
Scrape the cheese in to a bowl and press it down all over with a fork to break it up. It’s pretty clear at this stage that it is too thick and there’s no way you could spread this on fresh dough.
Add a teaspoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of water to the bowl and mix through with the fork to thin out the sauce. You may need an additional tablespoon. You want it to be similar to yoghurt in terms of thickness.
Grate around 20g of hard cheese, I like to use Grana Padano but others will do fine. Add this to the bowl and mix through. Finish off by grating or mincing 1 large clove of garlic.
That’s it! 5 ingredients, 5 minutes, and no cooking at all for the perfect white sauce base!
If you want you can give it a sprinkle of salt and pepper to taste as well prior to topping the pizza.
This white sauce is really versatile and takes on additional flavours with ease. Keep your eyes peeled and subscribe to see future pizza recipes with added sauce ingredients!
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