Pizza from First Principles: Sauce

At its core, American pizza is a really simple dish, and can be comprised of only four ingredients: dough, sauce, cheese, and toppings. Each ingredient needs to be thoughtfully produced to create a harmony with its companions. These ingredients can taste fantastic on their own, but together morph into a horrible product. So when we’re creating a pizza sauce, we can’t create a sauce without considering the flavor imparted by the others. This balance is most apparent in the sauce as it will be the vessel upon which all other toppings are built on. A bad sauce will quickly and definitely ruin a pizza.

When we started creating our pizza sauce, we started from the ground up: What sort of flavor did we want out of dough? How was our cheese going to melt and mold with the sauce? What toppings were we using on our pizza? We need balance between the different flavors: salt, fat, acid, heat, umami. Umami in particular, with sauce is of utmost importance; tomatoes are a fantastic provider of a rich umami, and our problem was less of how to make it shine, but rather how to temper it and make it mature.

Clearly, the most important ingredient of our sauce was the tomatoes. We took inspiration from the Italian Neapolitan pizza, which by law must use a tomato variety called San Marzano.

San Marzano tomatoes are a sweeter, richer variety of tomatoes and are responsible for the richness that people associate with a good tomato sauce. The trick, however, is finding officially certified San Marzano tomatoes for cheap; as with many Italian exports, the industry is run by a cartel.

We started with a simple recipe given to us by Ken Forkish of Flour, Salt, Water, Yeast fame. Simply drain the San Marzano tomatoes for 10 minutes, cut up a clove of garlic (we thought this was too little and ended up tripling), and add some olive oil with salt to taste all in a blender and pulse until smooth. It ended up being a great dipping sauce, but with our garlic modification and the Vitamix completely pureeing the sauce together, it wasn’t what we were looking for in a pizza. We were missing texture, and the umami from the tomatoes + raw garlic was overpowering with the rest of the ingredients.

Arjun, who was helping me with the project this week mentioned that he knew a fantastic marinara recipe from J. Kenji Alt-Lopez of the Food Lab and seriouseats.com fame. This recipe proved to be much closer to what both of us were looking for in a sauce, the light, soft delicious texture of the softened, but still slightly chunky tomato, a more balanced flavor profile aided by the addition of yellow onions, microplaned garlic cloves, along with the fat imparted by a combination of olive oil and butter. Butter, here proved to be the biggest aid to our flavor; I highly recommend buying a high fat butter, think Kerrygold, or if you’re lucky and have access to an Amish grocer, that would be ideal.

Thanks to a quick detour, Arjun was able to procure a high fat hand churned FATTY butter. Look how yellow it was.