Tomato Sauce

I’m often asked about using fresh or canned tomatoes. For sauce, canned is better. Chances are, no matter when you make pizza, it won’t be tomato season. If you can get great in-season tomatoes there are better ways to use them on pizza.

Many people don’t know that the plum tomato (like the famous San Marzano), the tomato most prized for Italian-style tomato sauces, was bred to be packed. In fact, many Italians and Italian-Americans still buy tomatoes in bulk in summer and jar them for the rest of the year. According to David Gentilcore’s Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, the modern variety of the plum tomato (the “square tomato”) is bred to be low to the ground for harvesting machines and yield. The rise of the tomato and the rise of food industrialization in Italy are linked, it seems.