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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