I love making pizzas from scratch. In just a few minutes you can whip up a few pennies worth of ingredients into a dough that will be as crisp as a saltine on the bottom and soft an airy in the middle. And instead of having to choose from a list of pre-packaged toppings, you can put anything you want on it (my favorite is a mixture of mozzarella and gorgonzola cheese, with fresh basil and prosciutto put on top immediately after it comes out of the oven). Not only is it delicious, but it feels pretty great to be able to say you make your pizza from scratch.
But I always feel embarrassed when it comes time to put the sauce on the dough, and I have to reach into my fridge and pull out a jar of Prego. So on Monday night, I grabbed a recipe off of Smitten Kitchen and set to work making enough sauce to get me through several pizza nights.
Ingredients:
4 pounds of tomatoes
1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 a carrot
1/2 a stalk of celery
1 small onion (I actually got a medium onion and used about 3/4 of it, saving the rest for pizza toppings)
4 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup red wine*
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper**
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon parsley
1/4 teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon fresh basil
*I included the wine mostly so I could drink it while cooking.
**Because the sauce was for pizza, I tried to spice it up a bit, so be warned that if you plan to pour this over pasta you’ll probably want to reduce or eliminate the cayenne pepper. Jillian kept complaining that every time she tasted it fresh she had to drink more wine.***
***Although, come to think of it, that’s another good reason to keep the cayenne pepper in the recipe.
I started by cutting small Xs in the bottoms of all the tomatoes. I boiled a pot of water and placed a large bowl full of ice water nearby. I dropped the tomatoes in the boiling water for about 30 seconds (making scald my arms with the splatter in the process), then fished them out with a big spoon and dropped them in the ice water. Peeling them was easy after that.
I set up a strainer over a bowl, cut the tomatoes into quarters and squeezed out the seeds over the strainer. It was awesome — the tomatoes feel gross and slimy and juice squirts out all over the place. I kept the leftover juice in the bowl in case I needed to thin the sauce out later, but didn’t end up needing it.
I wanted the sauce smooth, so I took the carrot, celery, onion and garlic, chopped them all coarsely and then whirred them in the food processor until they were basically a paste.
I put a little olive oil in the bottom of a large pot and scraped in the carrot-celery-onion-garlic paste. After about 10 minutes, I added the peppers, paprika and bay leaves. I stirred it for about 30 seconds and then added the tomatoes and red wine.
I let it cook in what was barely a simmer for about an hour, then added the salt and herbs. After about 5 minutes off the burner, perfection.
