Reverse Engineering/Cloning Papa John's Pizza Sauce

[CDNpielover]

it's the end of a long day mediating between 2 conflicting "senior" co-authors on a scientific manuscript.  i'm making pete's awesome pj sauce clone, and just want to thank you pete for doing such thorough work on this formulation.  i dont know what you do for work, but your approach is inspirational and the depth and clarity of your writing is second to none.  cheers!   and please keep up the great work!   

[Pete-zza]

it's the end of a long day mediating between 2 conflicting "senior" co-authors on a scientific manuscript.  i'm making pete's awesome pj sauce clone, and just want to thank you pete for doing such thorough work on this formulation.  i dont know what you do for work, but your approach is inspirational and the depth and clarity of your writing is second to none.  cheers!   and please keep up the great work!   

CDNpielover,

Thank you for the kind remarks. I guess you could say that what I do on this forum is my work, but it doesn't feel that way to me. I like the technical and mathematical aspects of pizza making, maybe even more than the pizzas themselves.

Peter

[JPHL]

I notice your sauce in reply#20 using walmart tomatoes uses somewhere around 21 oz of tomatoes.  the cans themselves contain 28 oz.  from an earlier post it seems you make them into a finer puree and do something else to remove excess water.  can you elaborate more on this.  I'm sorry if this is something basic but I am fairly new to pizzamaking and really cooking in general. 

[Pete-zza]

I notice your sauce in reply#20 using walmart tomatoes uses somewhere around 21 oz of tomatoes.  the cans themselves contain 28 oz.  from an earlier post it seems you make them into a finer puree and do something else to remove excess water.  can you elaborate more on this.  I'm sorry if this is something basic but I am fairly new to pizzamaking and really cooking in general.

JPHL,

I believe you meant to say Reply 30 rather than Reply 20 in your post. Reply 30 is the post where I discussed using the Wal-Mart Crushed Tomatoes in Puree, at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,6633.msg59208.html#msg59208.

The Wal-Mart tomatoes were not my first choice since they are not made from fresh-pack tomatoes. I decided try them, however, for the benefit of those members who did not have access to good canned fresh-pack tomatoes. I soon discovered, however, that the Wal-Mart tomatoes were more watery than the fresh-pack tomatoes. I was striving for the consistency of ground fresh-pack tomatoes. When I drained the Wal-Mart tomatoes, I ended up with less solid product. That is why the amount of the prepared Wal-Mart tomatoes was around 587 grams.

If you are considering using the Wal-Mart tomatoes, I have some good news for you. For some time now, Wal-Mart has been carrying the Classico brand of tomatoes. They are fresh-pack tomatoes and are produced by the same company (Escalon/Heinz) that produces the 6-in-1 fresh-pack canned tomatoes. You can see the particular Classico canned tomatoes that are available at different Wal-Mart stores at http://tomatoes.classico.com/products/. The product that comes closest to the 6-in-1s are the Classico Peeled Ground Tomatoes, although I think the Classico Crushed Tomatoes should also work. Not all Wal-Mart stores carry the entire Classico line so you may have to check out a few Wal-Marts.

Peter

[chaspie]

Peter, Walmart also sells (at least in my area) Cento brand All-Purpose Crushed tomatoes in 28 ounce cans.  That's what I've been using to make my sauce for NY style pizzas.  I assume they would work well for American style pizza too.  I think they taste great, and they are nice and thick, not watery.  The only ingredients are "Fresh Red Ripe Tomatoes".

   

[barkonbutts]

Great sauce, I like to use Cento petite diced tomatos, need to find sunflower oil...but with out it, the sauce is still just about spot on!!

[spazster]

I just tried this with Contadina whole peeled tomatoes. Either my strainer catches more than than Pete-zza' or they are just too watery.

[rdibble]

Peter,

Maybe when I have a little more time, we can talk about using instrumentation (that you hopefully have access to) and special techniques for determining constituents and their quantities in an unknown solution or material.

...

There are all sorts of ways of separating chemicals and compounds from a solution, which is what you really need to do for better accuracy.  I'll get back to this subject as soon as I can.

- red.november

Can you elaborate? I'm interested in these techniques.

[jenosmaverick]

I know this thread is like a couple of years old already but here goes. For the tomato any brand alternatives? we only have hunts,dona elena,del monte canned tomatoes here in the Philippines. Not pretty sure about heinz if they do have canned tomatoes. Sadly I don't have much of a choice

[Pete-zza]

I know this thread is like a couple of years old already but here goes. For the tomato any brand alternatives? we only have hunts,dona elena,del monte canned tomatoes here in the Philippines. Not pretty sure about heinz if they do have canned tomatoes. Sadly I don't have much of a choice

jenosmaverick,

Unfortunately, I will not be able to help you. However, I have an old friend of the forum that is active in the Philippines in the field of pizza. I will send you a PM with his real name and forum name that might enable you to get in touch with him to see if he can help. You should tell him that I referred you to him.

Peter

[jenosmaverick]

Thank you very much sir!

Kevin,

[MadMatt]

I'd like to try this but we don't have crushed tomatoes.. I use whole tomatoes and my current ones I'm using come in concentrated juice (most are just regular juice) so it's somewhat thick but still too watery that I'd have to drain some of it to use as a sauce. 


What would be a good way to turn whole tomatoes into crushed tomatoes?

Thanks

[Pete-zza]

I'd like to try this but we don't have crushed tomatoes.. I use whole tomatoes and my current ones I'm using come in concentrated juice (most are just regular juice) so it's somewhat thick but still too watery that I'd have to drain some of it to use as a sauce. 


What would be a good way to turn whole tomatoes into crushed tomatoes?

Thanks

MadMatt,

There are many different ways to convert either fresh or canned whole tomatoes to crushed form. You might want to do a Google search to find a method that you think will work best in your particular case. Many of the methods have videos to better show the process.

FYI, I have a food mill like the one shown in the photos starting at Reply 72 at:

https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=45149.msg462967#msg462967.

Peter

[MadMatt]

Pete when do you add the garlic because I've had a lot of pizza sauces coagulate from it should I heat it up in the oil?



I was surprised by the amount of sugar in this papa johns sauce clone until I looked up the nutritional info in pizza sauces you can buy in British supermarkets they may have more than yours but it's hard to calculate without the sugar already in your tin tomatoes.

Out of three leading British supermarkets their pizza sauces, that they call pizza toppers (how stupid is that?)  have this amount of sugar



7.6g   sugar per 100g
6.1g sugar per 100g
6.0g sugar per 100g

[Pete-zza]

Matt,

When I was playing around with the PJ clones, PJ told me the ingredients used to make their pizza sauce. I posted the PJ sauce formulation at Reply 20 at:

https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg58010#msg58010

You are correct that the PJ sauce does contain a fair amount of sugar, which is pretty high up in the ingredients statement (the ingredients are ordered by weight). And that would be the sugar added to the sauce, not the natural Sugars in the tomatoes themselves. As for the tomatoes used by PJ, I was once told by a member who seemed to be in the know (see Reply 21 at https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg58070#msg58070) that PJ used the Stanislaus Full Red tomatoes. Unfortunately, there are several Stanislaus tomatoes that are called Full Red, as you can see at:

https://www.stanislaus.com/products/nutrition-facts

However, were I to guess, I would perhaps go with the Full Red Concentrated Crushed Tomatoes at https://www.stanislaus.com/_pdfs/Full-Red-Concentrated-Crushed-Tomatoes.pdf or the Full Red Pizza Sauce at https://www.stanislaus.com/_pdfs/Full-Red-Pizza-Sauce.pdf. And if you look carefully, you will note that the Nutrition Facts for the two products are the same, including 4 grams of Sugars per 60-gram serving size. Those Sugars, along with the sugar added to the sauce, would be taken into account in the PJ nutrition information.

With respect to the garlic powder, it is dehydrated, as noted in the first post cited above. I assume that the garlic powder used by PJ is part of the spice packet used at the store level to make the PJ sauce. However, if you are using the garlic powder in a way that leads to gelling of the sauce, I suggest that you follow the advice rendered by Tom Lehmann at:

Reply 5 at https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=23273.msg236067#msg236067, and at

Reply 1 at https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=50312.msg506125#msg506125

Peter

[catlover1019]

Hi, I'm planning to make a pizza with this sauce. I wondering what post on this thread, if any, contains the most updated recipe. Also, if that recipe is easy to follow without a super-percise or accurate scale. The only scale I have is persice to 1 gram, but probably not too accurate. Also, what tomato product would you reccomend that's easy to find at a store like WalMart or Safeway (Vons)? I'm planning to start with a small batch, so I don't need or want one of those big 6 pund cans, I'm trying to find something a little more manageable. Thank you very much for doing all the work to reverse engineer this recipe.

[Pete-zza]

Hi, I'm planning to make a pizza with this sauce. I wondering what post on this thread, if any, contains the most updated recipe. Also, if that recipe is easy to follow without a super-percise or accurate scale. The only scale I have is persice to 1 gram, but probably not too accurate. Also, what tomato product would you reccomend that's easy to find at a store like WalMart or Safeway (Vons)? I'm planning to start with a small batch, so I don't need or want one of those big 6 pund cans, I'm trying to find something a little more manageable. Thank you very much for doing all the work to reverse engineer this recipe.

catlover1019,

It's been a while since I revisited the PJ clone sauce, so it may be useful to summarize my prior findings, while also addressing your specific questions.

I will start by saying that if one has access to the Stanislaus Full-Red Fully Prepared Pizza sauce such as described at https://www.stanislaus.com/_pdfs/Full-Red-Fully-Prepared-Pizza-Sauce.pdf or the Stanislaus Pizzaiolo "autentico" Pizza Sauce as described at https://www.stanislaus.com/_pdfs/Pizzaiolo-Autentico-Pizza-Sauce.pdf, both of those products would be good starting points to simulate the real PJ pizza sauce. But a fair amount of sugar would have to be added to those sauces. I do not have access to those products so I can't speak from experience. But I suspect they would be good products.

In my tests and experiments, I used the Escalon 6-in-1 ground tomatoes, the Stanislaus Tomato Magic pureed tomatoes (in the big can), and a WalMart Great Value pureed tomatoes product. I was able to purchase the 6-in-1s at the Escalon website. I found the Tomato Magic tomatoes at a market in Dallas. The Great Value tomatoes were purchased at a local WalMart. The three recipes can be seen here:

https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg56931#msg56931,

Reply 8 at https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg57044#msg57044 (a scaled up version using the 6-in-1s),

Reply 30 at https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg59208#msg59208, and

Reply 31 at https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=6633.msg61296#msg61296.

I believe that all three recipes will produce reasonable clones of the PJ pizza sauce. And from my tests I liked all three versions, and it would have been hard for me to pick one as the best although if push came to shove, I might have gone with the 6-in-1s. However, at the times of my tests I did not always have a real PJ pizza to do side-by-side comparisons.

In your case, I think you should be fine using a WalMart tomato product. But I would go with a ground or crushed tomato product. Over the years, the tomato product line at WalMart has changed many times. However, this morning I did a search of the current lineup of WalMart tomatoes and this is the one that seems to be the closest for our purposes:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Crushed-Tomatoes-28-Oz/10415230

I also don't think I would worry too much about your scale. In fact, you might want to use the volume measurements. You may have to tweak the recipe a bit to your taste because different brands of herbs and spices have somewhat different taste profiles. And the tastes can vary based on the age and condition of the herbs and spices.

As a final note, I checked the PJ website this morning (https://www.papajohns.com/company/papa-johns-ingredients.html), where I saw the list of ingredients for their pizza sauce, and it is basically the same sauce they have used for years.

Good luck and let us know how you did if you decide to proceed.

Peter

[ahmad213]

Hey Pete,

Just looking at your clone pizza sauce recipe and I am trying to proportion the ingredients to the batch size we would make in our takeaway with 10kg of pizza sauce. I have altered then numbers according to the percentages and added a white wine vinegar for extra tang.  Does this seem about right?

10kg plain canned tomato pizza sauce
300g oil
250g sugar
20g salt
20g oregano
20g basil
20g garlic powder
150ml white wine vinegar - correlated from another post I where it was approx 2 table spoon per 28 ounce (with slight reduction)

Am I just being paranoid or do these numbers seem about correct?

Mo

[Pete-zza]

Mo,

Can you tell me what is in the plain canned tomato pizza sauce?

Peter

[ahmad213]

Peter,

It is 'Tomatoes 99%, acidity regulator and salt.'

Thankyou,

Mo