Thursday, September 27, 2012

Pizza Sauce Recipe- by request

The masses have spoken- well, maybe not masses... but there have been a couple of requests for my pizza sauce recipe.  It is from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (with some tweaking).  It is really pretty simple but it takes time to cook it down thick enough.  Here goes the original recipe:
13 cups fresh tomato puree (from paste/plum tomatoes so it is thicker)
1/2 cup bottled lemon juice
1 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp ground black pepper
2 tsp dried oregano

I actually use red wine vinegar rather than lemon juice.  I like the flavor better for pizza sauce and it's still 5% acidity.
You can play around with the spices as much as you want, just don't change the ratio of tomato sauce to acid  (lemon juice or vinegar). I added a bit of onion powder as well and rather than oregano I use an Italian Herb blend that we get from the Amish bulk store that has oregano, basil and rosemary... and maybe a couple other things- it's tasty and I use it in lots of things.

Bring tomato sauce to a boil and add other ingredients.  Continue to simmer until it thickens to the consistency of a thin commercial sauce.  The recipe says 15 minutes but it took much longer for mine to thicken enough.
Ladle hot sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace.  Check for bubbles (although mine wasn't really that thick that I had to worry about bubbles), wipe rims and put on lids and rings.  The recipe calls for putting it into pint jars and water bath processing it for 35 minutes. I used half pint jars because there is no way I would ever use a full pint of pizza sauce at a time and I'd hate for it to go to waste. I guessed at processing time and did 20 minutes.

Hope that works.

We survived the homecoming parade this evening (but came home with a bag of candy).  Tomorrow will be a long day for I15.  Poor Boo.

7 comments:

  1. How many half pints did this make? It sounds like something I would like to try; we love pizza and hate the commercial sauce...

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    1. Hi! Thanks for stopping in! The original recipe said it produced 4 pints. I actually got 9 half pint jars plus a little extra to sample (not enough for a jar but enough for one pizza). It probably depends on how thick you make it. If I had cooked it longer I would have had less. But in general I think 8 or 9 jars is typical.

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  2. Thank you, Judy! That sounds perfecto! I will try it with the last of the tomatoes this weekend. I usually can things like sauce and ketchup in those little bitty jars since it's all for the one of me. That should keep me in pizza for a year or two!

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    1. Those teeny tiny jars would probably be enough for one pizza. But with teenage boys that would never be enough. But I can't imagine needing a full pint. When we would buy the commercial stuff I always struggled to use an entire can.

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  3. Hey thanks for this good recipe! It is nice explained!

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Glad you stopped in. I would love to hear from you.