Tomato sauce – Pizza sauce

When I make pizza, or, for that matter, make anything that requires tomatoes, I reach for a jar of our passata – which is an Italian word for sauce, except that it isn’t really sauce.

Let me explain, if I can. Passata is a product you make by passing cooked roma tomatoes through a mill. The only ingredient is tomato. It isn’t sauce, per se. It’s crushed tomatoes. With a basil leaf or two and a touch of citric acid to make absolutely sure I don’t kill any of my family members, even though the acidity of tomatoes makes it pretty hard to grow anything in there. I wouldn’t dream of canning garlic or mushrooms but tomatoes are pretty safe – a low bar to clear.

In tandem with a bunch of other crazy neighbours, every year I get about 120 pounds of organic Roma tomatoes from a farm not too far from Vancouver. The tomatoes show up in boxes, all ripe and perfect, and we (myself and any other family members I can dragoon into helping) spend an afternoon boiling them up and running them through a food mill, making several dozen jars of passata. Or sauce. Or whatever the English word is for sieved tomatoes.

To take the sauce from passata to pizza sauce, I make it the way Joe Beddia tells me to do it in Pizza Camp. Fresh tomatoes, no cooking. Bit of garlic, oil and salt. Let stand for a few hours, or overnight.

I used to just use it straight from the jar, but there is a lot of moisture in with the tomato pulp and things were getting a bit gooey, so now I have taken to concentrating the pulp by running yet again through a sieve. I used to use a coffee filter as well but that was just too much trouble – messy and super time-consuming. The fine sieve works, uh, fine.

It tastes great. Takes a couple of hours to do, but only about 30 seconds of work – the rest is waiting for things to drain.

Simple, tasty. I do love having the jars of tomato in the basement. We use them for all kinds of things. Now if only I could convince a certain wife of mine to let me build a wood-fired pizza oven in the backyard. So far my attempts to articulate my rock-solid case for a new piece of backyard furniture have fallen on deaf ears.