After the dough and the heat, the sauce and the cheese account for most of what a pizza tastes like. Both are areas where doing less produces a better result.
Uncooked Sauce
The standard for high-temperature pizza is startlingly simple: good tinned tomatoes, crushed by hand, a little salt, and nothing else.
It is not cooked beforehand because it cooks on the pizza. In a four-minute bake at high heat the tomatoes concentrate and sweeten without losing their freshness.
Cooking the sauce first makes sense for a longer, cooler bake, where an uncooked sauce would sit wet on the base. Matching the sauce to the bake is the useful principle.
The High-Heat Difference
At high temperature, cheese browns and blisters in the same few minutes the crust does, which is the classic pizzeria appearance.
At domestic oven temperatures the cheese melts long before the crust is ready, so it sits and separates. Ovens reaching around 800°F on a stone, of the kind at piezano.net, keep the two on the same timeline.
Tomatoes
Whole peeled tomatoes crushed by hand are better than passata, which is thinner and wetter, and better than pre-made pizza sauce, which is usually over-seasoned.
Draining some of the liquid before crushing reduces the moisture load on the base considerably, and the liquid is worth keeping for something else.
How Much
- A thin single layer, spread with the back of a spoon
- Stopping short of the rim by an inch or so
- Roughly three or four tablespoons for a twelve-inch base
- Less than instinct suggests, always
Cheese
Fresh mozzarella tastes better and carries a great deal of water. Low-moisture mozzarella browns better, stretches further and stays drier.
The compromise most people settle on is fresh mozzarella, drained and patted dry, torn rather than sliced, and used sparingly. Torn pieces with gaps between them melt into the sauce rather than forming a wet sheet.
Grate Your Own
Bagged pre-grated cheese is coated with starch or cellulose to stop it clumping, and that coating prevents smooth melting.
Anyone whose cheese has gone grainy has usually met this. Grating your own takes a minute and resolves it entirely.
Additions
A hard grated cheese alongside the mozzarella adds savoury depth for very little volume. A little olive oil after the bake, rather than before, adds aroma without soaking the base.
Fresh basil goes on after baking. In a hot oven it burns to nothing in seconds.
Salt
Under-salted sauce is the most common flavour failing and the easiest to fix. Taste the sauce before it goes on; it should taste slightly too seasoned on its own, since the dough and cheese dilute it.
Keep It Restrained
The best pizzas carry noticeably less than most people expect. Sparse sauce, torn cheese, two or three toppings at most.
