Can You Help Me Solve the MYSTERY of *Pizza* Sauce?

Pizza_sauce What is it about pizza sauce?

I love the stuff.

What do I want on my pizza? Pizza sauce.

What do I want on my spaghetti? Pizza sauce.

What do I want on macaroni and cheese? Pizza sauce.

It tastes so much better than regular tomato sauce . . . than spaghetti sauce . . . even than salsa (though salsa is close).

Yet all are based on tomatoes, with spices making the principal taste differences.

I'm sure that I even have the correct spices in my (extensive) spice colletion–I just don't know what they are!

If you look on the label of a can of pizza sauce it just lists the relevant ingredients as being "spices."

AARGH!

Can you help me determine what makes pizza sauce so special?–what sets it apart, and ABOVE, its wannabe cousins, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, and even the close-runner-up, salsa?

The pictured jar even teases us by saying it's "homemade style"–but how are we supposed to make it at home???!!1

HELP!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

23 thoughts on “Can You Help Me Solve the MYSTERY of *Pizza* Sauce?”

  1. My wife is Sicilian, and we’ll make a huge batch of spaghetti sauce every other week, and then use that as our pizza sauce for our Sunday tradition of making home-made pizza from scratch (including the crust, and of course, the sauce!)
    I cannot disclose the full recipe, lest I have a few large Italian guys pursuing me, but the general consensus is if you want a tasty sauce, make it by making spaghetti sauce first. Make meat-balls and cook them in the sauce (about an hour of simmering for meatballs about 1 1/2 inch in diameter. They flavor the sauce incredibly if they’re seasoned right.
    The only seasonings used in either the meatballs or the sauce are:
    -Basil
    -Oregano
    -Sugar to cut the acidity (it’s only a tablespoon or so, so it has a negligible impact on Glycemic Index, especially when paired with something like Dream Fields Pasta)
    -Garlic [powder or fresh]
    -A bit of salt and pepper.
    But the jarred “spices” often include weird things that just don’t need to be there.

  3. Often pizza sauce will use fennel, so maybe that’s the difference?
    I don’t really know about pizza sauce from a jar, though, so I don’t know if this will help or not. When I make homemade pizza sauce I begin with caramelizing onion and garlic, the also caramelize the sugars in the tomato paste by browning it in the oil before adding my crushed tomatoes. That makes for a deeper flavor. I season with basil, oregano, and red pepper flakes.

  4. There is a pizza place nearby that makes our favorite pizza. It’s different from other pizzas, somehow, and its the sauce. My father and I spent years going there weekly and trying to figure it out, watching the people making the pizzas, trying to eat very slowly and pay attention to the taste, eating only the sauce when possible. It has a very subtly sweet taste, or at least it seems to. Sometimes I think I taste something citrus-like as well. In experimenting at home, the closest thing I have come up with is to mix orange soda in with tomato sauce, but I’m just not sure. It’s also a mystery…

  5. I think it’s because the tomato paste is more concentrated. It’s less watery than spaghetti sauce.

  7. I suspect it’s the same as the “Grill spice” available here in Norway: it contains a lot of monosodium glutamate (MSG) or a similar substance which tastes of umami (“savory”), the fifth basic taste that tastes like wanting more.
    Does eating a lot of it give you a mild headache and high blood pressure?

  8. My mom makes great homemade pizza, including homemade pizza sauce. I don’t know her recipe, but probably you could find a recipe somewhere.

  9. Oregano and aniseed are the main spices I use (it is a testament to the power of my mother’s sauce that I include anise even though I hate licorice flavor, because that’s the way my mom makes it). I also use grated carrots instead of sugar if I need a little sweetness (too many commercial pizza sauces are too sweet, in my opinion).

  10. It always seemed to me that pizza sauce was thicker than spaghetti sauce, and also a bit sweeter, and a bit spicier as well.

  11. My pizza sauce is basically:
    diced carmelized onion
    1 little can tomato paste
    1 cup water (or broth of some kind if I have it on hand)
    I cut the acid of the tomato a little bit with a teaspoon sugar if I’m using cheap tomato paste.
    and then I season generously with oregano, basil, and a little cayenne for heat. Looking at the other responses, there seems to be a consensus on the oregano and basil.

  12. SUGAR?? Yes, if you think store-bought sauce is good, add a cup of sugar to tomato paste and you’re on the right track.
    But if you want a really good Italian sauce, skip the sugar. Take a large pot of crushed and diced tomatoes and add in onions, garlic, parsley, basil, oregano, Parmesan cheese, salt & pepper (my momma prefers white pepper and marjoram). Make up a batch of meatballs using the same ingredients plus three eggs for the first pound of meat and 1 egg for every pound thereafter and some breadcrumbs if you are poor like we always were (if you don’t add breadcrumbs, cut back on the eggs). Brown the meatballs in olive oil (so the outsides are dark and the insides aren’t done) and dump them in the sauce with the leftover oil. Cook for 6 hours or so (until it’s cooked down). This will 1) reduce the acidity of the tomatoes, 2) make it thicker, and 3) make it tastier. If you aren’t going to be around to stir it, throw it in a crockpot.
    Now I’m craving a good sauce with some tasty meatballs…

  15. Can you help me determine what makes pizza sauce so special?–what sets it apart, and ABOVE, its wannabe cousins, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, and even the close-runner-up, salsa?
    Why, yes, yes, I can. I will need a $30,000 loan to buy the GC Mass Spectrometer so I can determine the exact organic compounds in the sauce 🙂
    Barring that, there’s always the low-tech way: the spices cannot be that exotic, since that would cost too much money, so about 15 of the most common spices will do. Then, try all possible combinations. There are only 32,768 possible ones. Sell samples at the UCLA football game. Profit!
    Really, is there only one type of pizza sauce? Is there one particular pizza sauce that you crave? There is a way to find out the ingredients with a little chemical knowledge. Spices contain volatile oils that are lipid soluble. As such, they can be isolated by their retention time in paper (or thin-layer)or liquid phase chromatography.
    Here is one way to do it: take some of the sample and get about twenty rectangular (same dimensions) sheets of filter paper. Get some alcohol. Add small spots of the different test spices to the bottom of the filter paper at a fixed length from the bottom of the paper. Grind the spices into powder, if necessary. At a fixed distance below the spots, add a small amount (one drop) of alcohol (other solvents would be better, but are probably illegal for the average person to get). Now, as the alcohol moves up the paper due to capillary action, it will reach and then transport the non-polar soluble oils in the spices. The ratio from the spot to the top of the paper is the retention time, Rf. Each oil will have its own, unique, Rf.
    Then, take a sample of the pizza sauce and do the same thing. You will get a range of different compounds coming out which can be identified by their retention times which will then give a clue as to the identities of the spices, used.
    Too Geeky?
    The Chicken

  16. The most common herbs used in pizza sauce are oregano, basil, thyme, sage, marjoram, savory and fennel.
    But be sure to use the best Italian tomatoes. You can buy them whole & peeled and then put them in a blender to get them smooth, or buy them already pureed.

  17. Tomato paste — you can add a little double-concentrated tomato paste from a tube, that really changes the flavor of regular pasta sauce.
    Also, Oregano and Thyme are more present in pizza sauce than pasta sauce.

  20. My favorite is the unlabelled sauce in a can that comes with a Chef Boy-ar-dee pizza kit. Something about good memories of my mother making us those pizzas when I was growing up.
    Love the science experiment, Chicken! We have been doing a lot of them lately in our homeschool lessons, and I’m adding that one in too. 🙂
    I checked the ingredients at the Ragu website, and it says: TOMATO PUREE (WATER, TOMATO PASTE), SOYBEAN OIL, SALT, SPICES, NATURAL FLAVOR. At least there’s no added sugar! I have started to see soybean oil in the stores in the last month or so; up to now it hasn’t been widely available for home use, so no one could really duplicate Ragu’s recipe exactly at home.
    And “natural flavor” is almost always a code for MSG, or if Ragu didn’t put MSG per se in it, then for something that makes free glutamates to punch up the umami, as already mentioned. Soybean oil and MSG are NOT good for you (sorry, Jimmy, I hated to have to say it). Our family is sensitive to those ingredients (along with artificial colors, and High-Fructose Corn Syrup, which is NOT the “same” as sugar no matter what the lady in the cornfield maze on tv says to the contrary) and has had to quit using anything with unidentified “spices” and “natural flavors.”
    Coconut oil, on the other hand, is superb… 🙂 Well, maybe not in a tomato sauce where olive oil would be best, but it’s great for frying.

  21. I must apologize. I broke one of my own rules and used a statistic without providing data to back it up. I said “‘natural flavor’ is almost always a code for MSG,” and “almost always” is a nice vague scare-mongering number. I usually know better than to write like that. Sorry! I was a little distracted for a bit there; sometimes the wee bairns need supervision for their science experiments, especially when I hear a loud “boom” from somewhere outside.
    Here are some sources of MSG information, from people who have it in for MSG, whether for good or bad motives I don’t know yet (well, it’s not like the processed food industry is going to tell us the downsides of their products!).
    http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html
    http://www.naturalnews.com/033560_yeast_extract_MSG.html#ixzz1XrHFNGhK
    http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/21/msg-is-this-silent-killer-lurking-in-your-kitchen-cabinets.aspx
    http://www.westonaprice.org/msg-updates/propaganda-about-msg
    And yes, I know these guys chase each other around in their articles’ footnotes, frequently quoting each other. I haven’t found better sources, especially not for a consumer instead of a nutrition science researcher. I take the scanty research and our family’s food sensitivities together and come up with enough cause to avoid MSG.
    And no, I haven’t found a perfect home substitute for pasta and pizza sauces, although I do have quart canning jars and a huge pressure canner from Sears standing by, waiting for the day I do find the recipe. I suspect that the industrial processors have the advantage, being able to produce temperatures and pressures in gigantic vats that induce flavor-enhancing changes to the basic ingredients that taste buds can detect but home stoves can’t duplicate.

  22. For anyone who needs more reasons to search for the perfect pizza sauce recipe at home and avoid the MSG in the store-bought stuff, here is what passes in grant-driven academe for scientific research, from MedLine’s database, regarding MSG. Just to get another persective, besides that of the health food crusaders that I linked to earlier. I forgot to mention that researchers use MSG to fatten mice so they can test various obesity cures on them, so you will see papers about mice and rats with MSG-induced obesity, induced hypothalamic disease, and induced metabolic syndrome:
    [home site is http://www.pubmed.gov, which redirects to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ]
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=monosodium%20glutamate%20obesity gives you the results of a search for “monosodium glutamate obesity”.
    I know, I know, I should quit while I’m ahead. But I love to get an in-depth view of stuff like this. When I’m not watching Dr. Who or reading up on the Church fathers. 🙂

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