Homemade Pizza Sauce

I’ve included my recipe for making homemade pizza sauce in a few posts in the past, but as I made a large batch on Saturday night, I decided it deserved a post all its own. Homemade pizza sauce is so simple and it tastes SO much better than anything you’d buy at the store. And I am a pizza sauce kind of girl. In fact, I usually prefer a pizza with half the cheese and double the sauce. There’s no health reason or counting calories behind that, it’s simply a taste preference.

So, you know I’m very particular when it comes to a pizza sauce. I’ve been making my own sauce for a few years now and I’ve played around with it plenty. I don’t measure anything (unless I have to in order to share the recipe) and I mix up the textures quite a bit, but the underlying taste is always the same, and we all love it around here!

Since I was freezing half a batch of pizza dough when we had pizzas on Saturday night, I decided to double the pizza sauce to freeze as well. I was quite proud of the common sense I used there. (For some reason, pregnancy and common sense don’t always go hand-in-hand for me.)

Homemade Pizza Sauce

• 1 15 oz. can diced or petite-diced tomatoes
• 1 6 oz. can tomato paste
• 1 1/2 T. olive oil
• 2 – 3 t. Italian seasoning
• 1 1/4 t. salt
• 1 t. garlic powder
• 1 t. sugar
• 1/2 t. black pepper
• 1/8 t. crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 T. water, optional

1. Combine all of the ingredients in a small bowl and stir until well mixed. Only add the water if the sauce is too thick for your liking. Cover and refrigerate until using.

This recipe is for a chunky-style pizza sauce. That’s really my preference, although you won’t find it served at too many places. But I grew up loving my Chicago-style pizza at Gino’s East, so that chunky sauce has my heart. If you’re not a fan of chunky sauce, you can replace the diced tomatoes with an 8 oz. jar of tomato sauce plus about 1/4 c. of water, or you can just process the diced tomatoes in a food processor or blender until they are smooth.

Anyone else prefer the sauce on a pizza, particularly a chunky sauce, to the rest of the toppings?