As much as we talk about pizza you'd think my family ate nothing but pizza, but actually we haven't had it in several weeks. We've been too busy to make it. We just got back from a long camping trip/festival on Sunday and had very little food in the house because I had completely cleaned out the refrigerator before we left. But we did have cheese and loads of veggies from the garden, and we always have baking ingredients on hand, so we cobbled together some of the best pizza we've ever had. The dough was our usual bread machine dough, but the sauce was absolutely killer this time! If only I'd had fresh herbs on hand when I made it....but, alas, my herb garden at the house is only in the planning stages and the pots I have on the back patio have suffered terribly in the hot, dry weather we've had this year. The fresh garden ingredients and explode in your mouth flavor still rated a "Mom, we've GOT to blog about this!" from Cameron and about 20 repetitions of "This is THE BEST, Mom!" from Catherine. Dave even commented on the sauce more than once and said that it would be good on pasta, which is high praise indeed from the man who hates pasta. LOL Okay, enough chatter about how good it was. Here's the formula:
"Best Ever" Fresh from the Garden Pizza Sauce
Saute 1 small finely chopped onion and 2 tsp (or two cloves) garlic in a little oil until the onion is soft. Add a generous handful of grated carrot, one small zucchini or summer squash (grated) and 1 finely chopped green pepper. (I used a large banana pepper for this batch since that's what I had on hand, but bell pepper will obviously work too.) Saute another minute or two then add a couple of bay leaves, 1 tsp thyme, 2 tsp basil, 2 tsp parsley, and 2 tsp oregano. Then add one 6 oz can tomato paste and about 8-10 finely chopped fresh tomatoes and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Season to taste with salt, pepper and sweetener. (I used about 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp pepper and about 1/2 tsp of agave syrup.) It should be pretty thick, but the actualy thickness will depend on the size and juiciness of the tomatoes. We like our pizza sauce really thick so it stays put on the pizza, but if I were going to use it for pasta I'd thin it with broth or water. Absolute ambrosia! (I think we ate half the batch before the pizza dough was done!)
Like I said before, we let the bread machine do all the work for the pizza dough so I made the sauce while the bread machine was running. We use a very basic pizza dough recipe so that we can jazz it up with herbs and spices or whatever, but if anyone's interested, here's the recipe:
Basic Whole Wheat White Blend Pizza Dough
(for breadmaking machines)
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 1/2 cups unbleached white flour (we use organic from the bulk section of the health food store)
2 cups whole wheat flour (ditto)
2 tsp yeast
Put everything in your bread machine on the dough cycle and let the machine do all the work! We alter this basic recipe by adding herbs and garlic (especially if we're making bread sticks with it). We've also tried things like using beer in place of the water, adding sundried tomatoes and basil, adding chopped olives, and other things like that. One thing I haven't tried yet is adding curry powder to the dough. Curried topping on pizza is awesome but I haven't tried putting the spices in the dough. (Maybe with a caramlized onion and/or roasted veggie topping?)
