OK, I know its easy to pick up a jar of pizza sauce at the grocery but what do you do if you find yourself ready to make a pizza but don’t have any pre-made pizza sauce? Um, you make it yourself and after the first time you make, you might never buy pizza sauce again. We’ve been making our own pizzas for a few years now have settled on a couple techniques. One is to use the pizza dough from Trader Joe’s because it’s so convenient and it taste good. The other method is to use Trader Joe’s Lavash Bread. We’ve used a lot of different sauces for the pizza but we’d never set out to make a traditional pizza sauce because we always have a jar or can of a store bought sauce. One day we realized we didn’t have any pizza sauce so we looked online for directions. There are a lot of them but we didn’t want to spend hours simmering a sauce and we didn’t want to use a lot of ingredients. When we found a selection with simple ingredients and simple cooking methods, we took the flavor profile we were looking for and came up with this easy pizza sauce recipe. We’ve used it a number of times now and it always turns out great.
Some comments on the ingredients – this is supposed to be easy and from items already in your pantry. If you don’t have the separate containers of oregano, basil and rosemary, you can substitute with 1 1/2 tablespoons of Italian Seasoning mix. If you don’t have garlic cloves you can substitute with other forms of garlic. Check out this conversion for using garlic powder, garlic salt, etc.
We also found a similar recipe that uses 1 (28-ounce) can of whole tomatoes. You could use this instead of the tomato paste and 1 1/2 cups of water if you don’t have the tomato paste on hand.
Ingredients
- 6 oz can tomato paste
- 1 1/2 cups water
- 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 4 cloves garlic
- salt to taste
- black pepper to taste
- 1/2 tablespoon dried oregano
- 1/2 tablespoon dried basil
- 1/2 tablespoon dried rosemary, crushed
- 1 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
Instructions
Combine all ingredients into a saucepan. Cook over medium heat until mixture boils.
Reduce heat to low and simmer 10 minutes, or until it has the thick consistency of pizza sauce.
Allow sauce to cool and spread on pizza dough and add the toppings of your choice.