cullenary: Pizza Sauce

I love making homemade pizza, but mine always was a bit flawed, or watery I should say. After doing some research I tried a few new techniques. Here they are:

1. Do not cook the sauce. I was skeptical of this. I always made a big pot of sauce, let it cook on the stove and then put it on the pizza and cook it again in the oven. Well, it's already cooking in the oven, so there is no need to double cook it. That's why it may turn a bit brown sometimes.

2. Use whole peeled tomatoes. When at the store, shake the can. If it sounds watery, then the tomatoes are too bitter, look for cans that when you shake them, do not have too much sound.

3. Rinse the tomatoes. Use a small colander and wash the tomatoes. This will help take some of the bitterness out of the tomatoes.

Now here is the process of making the sauce:

Once the tomatoes have been rinsed, take off the top yellowy part of the tomato and if you so choose squeeze out the seeds, the extra water is not necessary, and could make your pizza watery in the end. Once all the tomatoes have been seeded, place in a bowl and mash them. I used an immersion blender. I think this worked really well. If you don't have an immersion blender on hand, a potato masher would work too. Then add salt, a tad of sugar, oregano, and grated romano (all to taste). I could not find grated romano at the store so I substituted with grated parmesan and added a bit more salt. If you do use romano, be careful as to how much salt you add because this already is a salty cheese. Mix together, add more spices/cheese after a taste if need be. You can store this sauce in the fridge. But when you are ready to use the sauce, get it to room temperature first. This sauce was delicious and will be the only way I make pizza sauce from now on.

I learned one other technique to help pizza not turn out too watery. Dry out your fresh mozzarella. A lot of times, fresh mozzarella comes in containers stored with water. I would usually slice it up and put it on the pizza, well this could be the problem too as why homemade pizza can turn out to be too watery. I took the mozzarella balls out of the water and wrapped them in paper towels for awhile so that the moisture would be taken out of them.