Background: I love to cook from scratch. If I could hunt and fish and forage for all my own food, I would. (I can’t.) If I could grow all the tomatoes and garlic and oregano and basil I needed for marinara, I would. (I can’t.) I don’t like industrially processed food. (I eat it, like everyone, but I don’t like it.) However, I have about 7 different canned goods that I regularly rely on. (I counted.) Two of them I use in my pizza sauce: a small can of tomato paste and a can of diced, fire roasted tomatoes. Add roasted garlic preserved in olive oil and you have the basis for a ton of different sauces. Remarkably, my kids will eat it in this form. It’s not really cooking. It’s not a recipe. It’s a series of moves, which I’ve outlined below:
- Source high quality roasted garlic confit or make your own. When I can’t make my own or don’t 100% trust the garlic, I use oil-marinated roasted, seasoned garlic from the specialty foods store’s olive bar. Keep it on hand in the fridge.
- Get a small can of tomato paste (6oz.) and a medium can (15.5 oz) of diced, roasted tomatoes. Drain the roasted tomatoes, reserving the liquid in the fridge for soups and sauces.
- Add both cans to a food processor, add garlic confit to taste, and pulse to desired consistency in a food processor.
- Portion out the amount needed for the night’s pizza party and freeze the rest in batches of the same size. For our house, this makes 8 pizzas unless it gets diverted into a different meal stream.
- If you are feeding kids, but you are pizza’d out, experiment with adding ingredients you love, and always have on hand, and make yourself something different. We’ve experimented with various incarnations of chicken parm, including a version made from cast off dino chicken. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, congratulations on your life choices.) Meatball sandwiches would be a great idea if you keep meatballs on hand and eat meat. (Try plant-based frozen chicken parm if you don’t.)
Why it works:
- Bad garlic will sink anything and everything it touches. If it’s rancid or even processed in a weird way, you will never cover up the taste. (For me this includes all garlic that comes in jars but isn’t pickled.) Using stored garlic confit means both consistency and that you save time that you would have spent peeling and roasting (or otherwise processing) raw garlic, which wouldn’t work in this move.
- The combination of the two cans of tomato products makes the perfect consistency for pizza sauce once you’ve drained the diced toms. While sodium is a concern with canned foods, the result of this is relatively low sodium or at least well within the acceptable range for me. The brand of tomatoes I use has 280 mg of sodium per serving, but the tomato paste only has 25 mg. Combined, that’s 1105 mg of sodium across the batch. Divide that by 8 pizzas and that’s just over 138 mg of sodium in the pizza sauce for one pizza.
- The garlic confit I use is also flavored with herbs. There’s citric acid and salt in the cooked tomato products. So there’s no additional herb, acid, oil or salt needed. This means there’s no need for tinkering with all the little bottles and jars, adjusting as you pulse (and potentially going too far and making a mess).
- You are essentially making a freezer staple from fridge and pantry staples. So it’s always available. I store mine in reused plastic restaurant containers labeled with Sharpie. You can write right on the lids. They are stack-able. I wash them in the dishwasher until they break and then recycle them. I don’t heat things in the them though, especially tomato products. So you’ll want to pull your sauce out the day before a pizza party. But even if it’s the same night, just nuke it in a glass container to defrost and it will be fine. The garlic is expensive if you buy it from the fancy olive bar like I do, but it’s worth it to me. The affordability of the rest of the ingredients offsets the price of the garlic.
- Because it’s an inexpensive staple that’s always on hand and requires no cooking and little waste, you can experiment with it endlessly. I use it to preserve veggies from the garden when I have too many zucchini or something. Because everyone in the house will eat it in some form, it can be the vegetable-based center of a meal. It’s a veggie situation that’s high in Lycopene, which is good, and has some other vitamin and mineral benefits, too.
Mods:
- I’m not even going to list that many mods for this one because y’all know what to do with pizza sauce and I’ve mentioned some above. That said….
- Pasta sauce is an obvious choice here, but consider what you put the sauce on. Thin it out, cook down some some chopped fresh vegetables in the liquid (think squashes, mushrooms, onions, carrots), and then put the pizza cheese on there and see if the kids will eat it.
- Add a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce like the ones pictured here and you can take it in a totally different direction with very little effort.
- Ground beef plus chilies = chili. Ground beef by itself = spaghetti sauce. You get the idea.