Last week Angie asked me what sauce I used for my pizza and if I had a recipe. I don’t, I’m more a pizza bianca person than a pizza with sauce person so if I want to put ‘sauce’ on, I use sun dried tomato paste and call it good.
The truth is that I don’t really have recipes for toppings. I have a pizza dough recipe that I use and I mostly make that with a mixture of bread, plain and wholemeal flour, recently I’ve started adding some sourdough starter to it too.
Friday Night Pizza is an opportunity to clear the fridge of leftovers and I just saute whatever vegetables are left in the fridge by Friday night. In my house, that’s usually onion, leeks, peppers and mushrooms, sometimes spinach and if there’s pancetta or chicken, then I might bung that in too. However, I’ve also dumped leftover roasted vegetables onto a pizza as well. I’ve caramelised red onions right down to a paste and used that instead of pizza sauce resulting in the ‘purple pizza’ and I’ve used BBQ sauce and chicken. If there was a rule it would be ‘anything in the fridge is fair game’. I’m the same with cheese, I mostly use mozzarella but anything that looks like it might not survive the weekend or is just in the cheese tray and looks interesting can and will be used.
Anyway back to the pizza sauce, I told Angie to take the passata she was using and “add a generous splash of balsamic vinegar and/or some red wine, salt and pepper and some of herbs (the Italian seasoning you buy in the dried herbs section would be my pick) and simmer it until it’s reduced by half. That should give you thick sauce that should work on pizza.”
As I has some leftover passata in the fridge (from this recipe from Amuse Your Bouche, which is completely amazing!), so I’d thought I’d give it a go. I measured the amounts and everything! This is what I did, it’ll keep in a jar in the fridge for a week or so or you can freeze it.
What
300ml passata
30ml balsamic vinegar
30ml red wine
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
Salt and pepper
How
Put in all in a saucepan and simmer until sauce is thick and about half the volume it was when you started.
Wipe down the hob, which is now covered in splashes of tomato sauce!
