PIZZA ALL AROUND - PART TWO

All right, pizza lovers, you know how to make the dough, now it's time to make the sauce. Unlike dough, making sauce is more art than science. I eyeball most of my measurements and taste as I go along, so every batch of sauce turns out a little different. This is really more of a general guide to give you an idea of how to make fucking epic pizza sauce that will impress all your friends.

PIZZA SAUCE

12 tomatoes, quartered (you want them all roughly the same size)
3-4 tablespoons olive oil (you want to just barely cover the bottom of the pot)
~6 cloves garlic, finely chopped (I usually use a little more garlic, but I am also a total garlic fiend)
1 tablespoon tomato paste
~2 tablespoons sugar (depending on how sweet you want your sauce)
1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
salt and pepper (add to taste)
any seasonings you think sound good in the sauce, ie. oregano, garlic powder, minced onion, etc.

Heat the olive oil on medium in a large stockpot. Add the garlic and saute until the garlic gets really aromatic. Add the tomatoes, stir, and let cook down. This takes quite a while. Use a spatula to mash them down every once and a while (every 8-10 minutes or so). Once they're more liquid than solid (about an hour), add the tomato paste and seasonings. Knock it down to simmer, and let it do so for about another hour, or really as long as you want.  The longer you let it simmer, the thicker and more flavorful the sauce will be. Stir occasionally.

When you decide it's done, let it cool and blend it til smooth in a blender. Make sure to let the sauce cool, as trying to blend it when hot can be fucking disastrous (trust me). If you want your sauce to be chunkier, blend only part of it and then add it back to the non-blended part. I like my sauce smooth, so I usually blend all of it. I also like to add a little more chopped fresh basil after blending to add some color.

This recipe makes a really good amount of sauce; it usually lasts me a week or two and I use it for pasta, too. You can freeze it if you don't want to use all of it within the week.