I’m curious about you quoting Harry as having said there were pizzerias who cooked half their sauce and blended that with uncooked tomatoes...I’m doing a lot of reading (again) about what happens when you cook tomatoes, and running back over some threads here (again) that contain spirited debate about the sanctity of sauce and the vulgarity of cooking it first. It’s all very, very interesting to me, as I’m working with a cooked sauce for only the second time in my professional life. And I’m loving the flavor on a plain pie. Even just a tomato pie with a garlic oil drizzle after bake, the cooked sauce just hits me in a satisfying way. I love uncooked tomato sauce as well, but that doesn’t surprise me—loving the cooked sauce does.
Our sauce recipe currently uses 5 #10 cans of crushed tomatoes in purée, added to the sautéed garlic and onions and then with basil added into the whole mix. Cook covered on lowest possible heat for about an hour, until the tomatoes get bright red and break down and become more watery. Then everything gets run through a food mill and I add salt and sugar.
A couple weeks ago I was thinking of the Harry tip and needed a batch of sauce done in a hurry, so I cooked just one can of tomatoes with the onions and garlic and spices/herbs, and put the other 4 cans through a quick blender cycle to break them down a bit. It turned out just fine and I added a bit more sugar to the recipe than I normally do, but the flavor on a cooked pizza just wasn’t as deep and I don’t know, mysterious? ...as when the entire batch gets cooked. Thought that I should give it a shot with half of the tomatoes to really test the idea, as I didn’t expect cooking just 20% of the tomatoes to get close to the original flavor.
But now I’m wondering about the origin of the idea itself to cook half of the tomatoes, because: no matter how low and slow the cooking process is, it seems inevitable that some of the sauce burns to the bottom of my stock pot. I don’t have the time to stir it continuously, and I want to keep it covered to trap water from escaping, so I’ve just accepted that I want to minimize the burning and have that as my goal. But the physics of the container a tomato sauce is likely to be cooked in makes me wonder how you could ever cook larger and larger batches of tomato sauce without losing more and more of it to burning. In a cylinder that’s vertically taller than it is horizontally wide, for the heat to make its way upward through the mass you’re just going to have to wait a while, and the bottom that’s taking direct heat from a burner will inevitably suffer the burning from contact with the flame, or electric element, whatever. Maybe induction burners would behave differently but I haven’t tested that, and more to the point, I don’t think pizzerias in the outer boroughs that cook their sauce are using induction burners. So I’m wondering...
In the effort to prepare a larger batch of sauce (5 cans really doesn’t yield me more than a day, day and a half sauce supply, and I’m only going through 30-40 pizzas on most days, plus sauce for meatballs and garlic knots), did someone decide to cook as much as their stock pot could hold and then blend it with an equal part of uncooked tomatoes out of necessity for getting more done at a time? Rather than going at it from a culinary angle first? This is pretty much where I am in trying to adjust our prep workflow and it occurred to me it could be the origin of Harry’s half-cooked sauce rumor. I’m planning on giving this a try soon, with my main concern being replicating the consistency I’ve been achieving (will I need to blend up 2 of the uncooked cans and mill the other 3?), and herb/spice ratios after that. Thought I would share this idea and see if it spurred any memories or suspicions in your sauce quests.
I had been thinking there was a best-of-both-worlds thing going on with only cooking half of the sauce, some genius move to sidestep the purity debate on both sides and achieve sauce transcendence via the middle path. Now I’m wondering if necessity is the mother of invention.
Would love to hear any thoughts you might have. Also curious about you saying that you ended up liking the flavors of the accidentally thicker sauces you were making recently; that’s my experience, too. I want that flavor but at the consistency of a thinner sauce.
