Mo,
When I tried to reproduce the Papa John's pizza sauce, I looked at their ingredients list for their sauce. That was given in the first post in this thread, at:
https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg56931#msg56931Today, I revisited the PJ website to see if they changed their pizza sauce. As you can see at
https://www.papajohns.com/company/papa-johns-ingredients.html, they did not, although they may have changed sources or brands.
I should mention at this point that in the U.S. when companies publicly post things like sauces and doughs with a listing of ingredients, the order of the ingredients should be by weights. This is by law. So, in the case of the PJ pizza sauce this means that there should be more tomatoes than sunflower oil, and more sunflower oil than sugar, more sugar than salt, more salt than garlic, and so on.
The listing of ingredients you proposed complies partly but not completely with the listing of ingredients as used in the PJ pizza sauce. This is not to suggest that your proposed sauce ingredients will not work or be satisfactory. But if your objective is to get close to what PJ does or what I did, you might want to use more garlic than either oregano or basil. And you might want to add a bit of ground black pepper since the PJ pizza sauce has that as an ingredient in addition to the oregano and basil "spices", as noted in Reply 4 at:
https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6758.msg58199;topicseen#msg58199Lastly, in your case, you propose to add white vinegar to your sauce and that should be sufficient as a source of citric acid (white vinegar is about 5% citric acid and about 95% water).
What you might want to do is to put all of your ingredients together but leave out the oregano and basil. You can then gradually add the oregano and basil and taste the sauce as you do so to be sure that you do not have too much of either and that the sauce passes your taste test. You perhaps keep track of how much oregano and basil you use to be able to replicate the sauce again in future efforts. You might also gradually add the white vinegar so that the sauce doesn't become overly thin. I'm sure that the citric acid that PJ uses is in dry powder form.
If you decide to proceed, please let us know how things turn out.
Peter
