Pizza Sauce

Now that I have a homemade pizza dough that both Joe and I like, I turned my attention to pizza sauce.  If you have ever purchased pizza sauce you might have noticed how expensive it is for what it actually is.  It is tomato sauce with some spices, that's it.  But because they package it up as "pizza sauce" they somehow can charge more than is really fair.  So, I figured in my effort to be frugal in areas that I care to be, I would try my hand at making my own pizza sauce.

It shouldn't have come to any kind of surprise to me that there would be such a variety of pizza sauce recipes but, for some reason, it did.  There were so many different recipes....so I narrowed my search by looking for recipes that had as few ingredients as possible and recipes that wouldn't turn out sweet pizza sauce.  (Joe has a thing about tomato sauces being too sweet....)  I found one that you didn't even have to cook and fit my other criteria so I gave it a whirl.  I changed a couple of things, mainly the amount of oil, and I have to say it came out pretty good.

Ingredients

• 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil (the orginal recipe called for 1/3 cup...that kind of makes me gag)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• salt to taste
• ground black pepper to taste
• 1/2 tablespoon dried oregano
• 1/4 tablespoon dried basil
• 
  
• Mix together the tomato paste, water, and olive oil. Mix well. Add garlic, salt and pepper to taste, oregano, and basil. Mix well and let stand several hours to let flavors blend. No cooking necessary, just spread on dough.

It wasn't as thick as the pizza sauces you buy in the store, but Joe and I liked it.  If you wanted it thicker I suppose you could just use less water or cook it a little bit.  It made quite a lot and now have some in the freezer.  I should probably make the disclaimer that I don't like a lot of sauce on my pizza so it what I made might last me longer than it would last you.  We used this pizza dough and it was yummy!  I wouldn't be surprised if we end up making it once a month!