The Best and Easiest Pizza Sauce Recipe Ever – Vegan

I’m back! My last post was for a Neapolitan-style pizza crust and this one is for homemade pizza sauce.

This seemingly pretty authentic recipe is adapted from Christina’s Cucina, a blog run by Christina, a Scottish-born Italian cook, whose mom is originally from just north of Naples, Italy. For anyone who knows, Naples is considered the birthplace of pizza so chances are, Christina is right that her mom makes amazing sauce. And I gotta tell you – I tried her recipe and wow. She is not playing around!

Christina emphasizes that the key to good pizza sauce is using high quality ingredients. To be clear, this isn’t snobbery. This is just her being realistic. And you know what else?

We aren’t even supposed to cook pizza sauce. She points that out in her post, where she posts a photo of cooking sauce and reiterates that that actually isn’t the pizza sauce as it is a misconceived notion that pizza sauce should be cooked prior to putting on the pizza.

This recipe is centered around good ingredients. While my local grocery store had some authentic canned tomatoes and supposedly good olive oil, it gave me an excuse to go to Providore Fine Foods, a pretty well-known foodie culinary playground store across town. I’m starting to miss going to the grocery store and if I was going to go, I wanted to go somewhere good.

Christina pointed out that the tomatoes must absolutely be Italian and who am I to argue? I found and purchased multiple canned Italian tomatoes but for this recipe, settled for this Strianese Brand one.

While I was at Providore, I kind of started rushing once I got to the olive oils because more and more people were entering the store. Honestly, being indoors with others still weirds me out a little bit so I grabbed one of the first olive oils I saw which was this Partanna Sicilian Extra Virgin Olive Oil. I tried a tiny bit of it and it was pretty peppery…but for this sauce? It was perfect.

The six ingredients I used are the canned San Marzano tomatoes, the good Italian olive oil, some dried oregano, my homegrown fresh Italian basil, my pantry kosher salt that I personally love and think is decent (no I didn’t use Maldon salt for this) and purple garlic.

Christina mentioned that while her family does use garlic in their pizza sauce, it isn’t common in many pizza sauces. But my family does love garlic so I chose to require garlic in this recipe.

Man, it’s so easy. To start, all you do is roughly mince your garlic , tear up your basil into small pieces – as small as you can without totally crumpling them up, and then add all the ingredients to a medium bowl.

Yes that looks pretty but that’s all going to be mixed up. This is pizza sauce remember? Next we crush and mix it all together.

Once we’re done, we spread it on the pizza dough evenly as possible (there will be some slightly chunky parts) but we are careful to not slather and soak the pizza as we don’t want it to be soggy.

Our sauce will look like this on our pizza after it has been cooked.

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