Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (29 page)

For the ultimate in fresh tomato taste, this sauce uses only the tender pulp of fresh plum tomatoes. The other fresh ingredients mingle with the tomato for a light, flavorful taste sensation! This sauce is best on thin-crust pizza with few additional toppings so that the fresh tomato taste shows through.

Makes enough sauce for one fourteen inch pizza.

8 -10 fresh plum tomatoes (or 1 1/2 pounds)
1 large clove garlic, crushed
1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 Tablespoons sweet red onion, very finely chopped (optional)
1 Tablespoon fresh basil, finely chopped or 1 teaspoon dried sweet basil
fresh ground pepper
salt

Place the tomatoes in boiling water for 1 – 2 minutes. Remove and immerse in a pan of cold water. Using your fingers or a knife, peel the skin off the tomatoes.

Cut each tomato in half so that the stem spot and the point on the bottom of the tomato are on separate pieces. Squeeze the seeds and liquid out of each half of the tomato (without squashing the tomato) and discard it. You leave out the seeds and juice from the center of the tomatoes to reduce the bitterness and to keep the moisture content of the sauce just right. What remains is the meaty, tender pulp that is the tomato’s most flavorful part. Cut out the stem spot and discard it. Cut each tomato half into four parts and place in a bowl. Alternatively, you can squash the tomato halves. To squash the tomato half, place it in the palm of your hand and make a fist, squeezing the tomato out between your fingers. Be careful, though, because squashing the tomatoes this way can send juice flying!

Add the garlic, olive oil, onion (optional), basil, and pepper to the tomatoes and mix well. Add salt to taste. Let stand until ready to assemble the pizza.

Sweet Pizza Sauce

One of the pizzerias where I grew up used with a sweet, rich tomato sauce for their Sicilian style pizza. Their sauce was unique and tasted wonderful. Here is my recipe that comes pretty close to the original.

Makes enough sauce for one eleven and a half by seventeen-inch pizza or two fourteen inch pizzas.

2 cups Basic Pizza Sauce (see recipe on
page 113
)
1 Tablespoon honey
1 Tablespoon olive oil

Combine all ingredients in a non-reactive bowl. Let stand until needed.

Eggplant Sauce

A recipe for eggplant lasagna inspired this sauce. It is a wonderful choice for thick crust pizza.
Makes four to five cups sauce.

1 large onion
1 medium sized eggplant, diced but not peeled
1/3 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 16 ounce can Italian-style tomatoes
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
1/2 cup dry red wine
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Sauté the onion and eggplant in the olive oil in a large, wide frying pan over medium heat. Cook for ten minutes, stirring frequently. Add the garlic and sauté for an additional five minutes. Add the tomatoes and their liquid, squeezing each tomato in your fist through your fingers to squash them. Add the tomato sauce, wine, parsley, oregano, basil, salt, and pepper. Bring the sauce to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Cover and cook for 15 – 20 minutes. Uncover and continue cooking until the sauce has thickened to the right consistency for pizza. Do not cook the sauce too long; you want to keep the vibrant flavor of the tomatoes intact.

Sassy South of the Border Sauce

I dreamed up this zesty sauce to complement half-wheat or whole-wheat pizza dough, but you certainly do not have to limit its use to that. By adding the spices after completing most of the cooking, the sauce retains a zesty brilliance that is unique.

Makes 2 1/2 cups of sauce with a south of the border flair.

1 poblano pepper
1 cup Vidalia™ onion (or other sweet onion), coarsely chopped
about 2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 cups Basic Pizza Sauce (see recipe
page 113
)
2 Tablespoons Mexican-style chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 juice from one-half lime
2 Tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped finely

Roast the poblano pepper on the grill or over a burner on a gas stove, turning it frequently until the skin is black and puffy all over. Place the blackened pepper in a paper bag for a few minutes; this enables the steam to loosen the skin. Peel the blackened skin off the pepper and leave the nice flesh of the pepper (be careful because the pepper will be hot). Remove the stem and seeds from the pepper and discard them. You may trim out the veins and discard them, if desired, to reduce the spiciness of the pepper. Chop the pepper finely.

Sauté the onion and poblano pepper in the olive oil in a skillet or frying pan until the onion is nicely softened but not brown. While the pan is still hot, pour in the Basic Pizza Sauce. Let the sauce mixture boil and thicken for two to three minutes, then add the chili powders and ground cumin and stir until well mixed. Turn off the heat and set the sauce aside until you are ready to use it. Add the limejuice and cilantro to the sauce (stirring to blend) right before you place it on a pizza.

Mustard Sauce

This sauce started out as a marinade for chicken. It has been adapted for use on pizza. It makes a wonderful accompaniment for chicken or crab.
Makes enough sauce for one fourteen to sixteen inch pizza.

3 Tablespoons olive oil
2 Tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon Tabasco® sauce
2 teaspoons dried rosemary, crushed
1 Tablespoon mustard seeds
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1 Tablespoon Dijon-style mustard
fresh ground black pepper

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Let stand until ready to assemble the pizza.

Neapolitan-style Sauce

For classic Neapolitan-style pizza, you must use the proper sauce. Neapolitan-style Pizza bakes at very high temperature. This causes the sauce on the pizza to boil quickly and it cooks the tomatoes while the pizza cooks. Because of this, you do not cook Neapolitan-style Sauce prior to baking the pizza. You can also use this sauce on virtually any style of pizza.

Makes enough sauce for four to six twelve inch pizzas.

1 can San Marzano™ tomatoes (there is no substitute, I’m told)
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
finely grained sea salt
freshly ground black pepper

Open the can and separate the tomatoes from the liquid. Reserve the liquid from the can so you can add it back to the sauce. Place the tomatoes into a blender and blend on the low or medium setting. You want to puree the tomatoes gently without crushing the seeds because crushed seeds can cause the sauce to be bitter. If you prefer a slightly chunkier sauce, use a potato masher instead of the blender. Add the oregano and salt and pepper to taste.

Add back enough of the reserved liquid to reach the desired consistency. Traditional Neapolitan-style sauce is very thin and would seem watery to most Americans. Use Neapolitan-style sauce for pizza that cooks at very high temperature so some of the water will evaporate from the sauce as it cooks. The sauce goes on wet and gets drier when cooked.

Thin-Style Pizza Recipes

The
Passionate About Pizza System

You will make great homemade pizza every time you try if you ignite your passion and follow a systematic approach to making pizza. Plan your pizza-making activities, use the same equipment and high-quality ingredients each time, use proven preparation techniques, rely on your RECIPES, and work to make continual improvements.

Thin-style Pizza Recipes

Thin-style pizza is the most widely available type of pizza. The shaped pizza dough does not rise before baking and that helps keep the crust thin. In addition, thin-style pizza usually bakes directly on the floor of a pizza oven. This helps make the crust both crunchy and chewy at the same time. Aside from these traits, there are many variations in the specifics of thin-style pizzas. Each pizza chef or pizzeria determines the exact recipe used for the dough. They choose how they shape the dough, how they form the rim on the edge, and exactly how thin they make the crust.

While there are probably infinite variations of thin-style pizza, a few major styles are worth describing. This chapter gives recipes for each of those major styles. Basic Pizzeria-style pizza is the foundation for almost all thin-style pizza baked in pizzerias. By changing the amount of oil in the dough, how you shape the pizza dough, the style of the rim around the dough, and whether the pizza bakes on a pan or directly on the floor of the pizza oven, you can duplicate almost any pizzeria’s specific form of thin-style pizza. You can find New York-style pizza in New York City as well as in much of the surrounding region; according to New Yorkers, you cannot find it anywhere else. My own experience corroborates this. California-style pizza is yet another innovation created in the Eureka State. You can sometimes find Whole Wheat pizza in any region, but I characterize it as a different type of pizza because the whole grain content of the crust requires different shaping techniques and gives a substantially different taste. Cracker crust pizza has a very thin crust that resembles crackers and you can find it all over the United States. Italian-style and Double Crust are specialty pizzas. The characteristics of the various thin-style pizza types are as follows (click to follow link):