Volunteer Pizza Sauce


I admit it.  I have a love-hate relationship with pizza.  While it may not be my favorite food, it may be the food I would pick if I could only have one to eat everyday, for the rest of my life.  I grew up loving it, in every form and only ever had one pizza I did not like.  Ever.  I even loved “Pizza Day” at our high school,  which meant the cafeteria was serving canned tomato sauce on hamburger bun with melted processed cheese.

I loved it all!  Until now.  Until fast-food pizza, frozen cardboard pizza, pizza that doesn’t taste anything like pizza is supposed to taste pizza. When I was a teenager/young adult, the only pizza that was publically available came from either an Italian restaurant or a local bar.  “Bar pizza” was the best!  Every local family-owned bar had a unique pizza recipe of it’s own — and I can still “taste” many of them, now, as I remember them.  But, sadly, those days are over, destroyed by fast-food chains and the raping of the American diet.

So, I learned to make my own pizza.  And any good pizza needs a good sauce.  A nice, simple sauce made from a few fresh ingredients.   Today, a homemade, basic pizza sauce is something I always have on hand — either canned from my own garden tomatoes, or made in bulk using a good quality canned tomato product and then canned for later use.  No unnecessary ingredients, no artificial flavors.  Simply delicious!

Volunteer Pizza Sauce

Like most of my recipes, my garden pizza sauce recipe varies from year to year, depending on the tomatoes I have in my garden that season.  This year, I had a large crop of “volunteer” tomatoes (a mysterious variety that grew out of our chicken’s homemade compost) so I decided to give them a place of honor in the name of several of this year’s recipes. 

ingredients

  • 16# assorted tomato varieties (3# Heirloom Roma tomatoes — so no need for added tomato paste to thicken sauce –, 5-1/2# Volunteers, and 7-1/2# assorted Heirloom varieties)
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 6 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 1 cup red wine
  • 2 tablespoons Italian seasoning blend
  • 2 teaspoons Kosher salt
  • freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • a handful of fresh Italian parsley, a cup?, leaves and stems, finely chopped
  • lemon juice, as needed

I peeled the tomatoes using the broiler method, and added the cooled pulp and it’s liquid to a large saucepan.  I added the remaining ingredients and simmered the sauce to my desired consistency.  It will thicken as the excess liquid cooks off, intensifying the flavor of the sauce.

Although tomatoes already have a high acid content, I chose to add several teaspoons to the top of the sauce when it was added to each sterilized canning jar.  Because I added low-acid onions and fresh parsley, I wanted to follow safe (recommended) procedures for water bath canning.

Process about 10 minutes (for pint jars) and then allow to cool, undisturbed, before checking seals.

Yield: made about 8 pints pizza sauce (enough for 16-24 pizzas).  YUM!


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