pizza!

After making homemade mozzarella, I though I should make pizza. Well, you can't very well BUY dough or sauce if you've gone to the trouble of making the cheese, can you? Absolutely not. I referred to my Cook's Illustrated,The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. They have a dough recipe for a thin crust pizza (awesome!) but have a sauce recipe using canned tomatoes (boo!). That won't do, I need to make a FRESH sauce! Thinking of the gajillion sauces I've made over the years, I went to the farmers market and loaded up on tomatoes.

I made the sauce and the dough the day before assembling the pizza.

Fresh Tomato Sauce
3 pounds tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 carrot, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
coarse salt and fresh ground black pepper

Bring a medium sized pot of water on high heat to boil. Have a large bowl filled with ice and water ready by the stove. With a knife, cut an X on the bottom of each tomato. Blanch the tomatoes so the skin can be easily removed, roughly 30 seconds to one minute. Remove the tomatoes (don't dump the boiling water yet) and place in the ice water bowl. If the skins don't peel right off, put the tomatoes back in the boiling water until the skins peel off easily. Now you can dump the boiling water. And the skins.

Cut the tomato in half and squeeze out the seeds and clear goo. Dice and put in a non-reactive bowl.

Heat the olive oil in a large pan over medium heat, until just shimmering. Add the onion, garlic, carrot and celery. Sauté until softened and slightly browned. Add in the chopped tomatoes, some salt and pepper. Stir, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove lid and simmer for an additional 15 minutes. Using an immersion blender, puree mixture until smooth. If you don't have an immersion blender, use your blender - but in batches. Or use a food processor. You just want it was smooth as possible. 

Assemble your pizza, bake and enjoy! I will say, it was really time consuming to make every component, but it made one helluva pizza.