Awesome Pizza SauceMakes French Bread Pizza Awesome!

For a long time, I've been striving to make a good pizza sauce. I've come close a few times, but still I ended up liking other pizza sauces better. That is until last night.

The sauce was inspired by a Youtube video of Chef Scott Conant preparing a lovely tomato pasta sauce for guest Ted Allen. It sounded so delicious that I just had to try it myself. One problem. I didn't have all the ingredients. So what do I always do when that happens?

I improvised. If you notice from the video, Chef Scott uses the best fresh roma tomatoes, fresh basil and of course great olive oil. I had canned tomatoes, dried italian seasoning and oregano and cheap olive oil from Walmart. It was his method I loosely tried to mimic. It turned out great!

Here's what I did...

Ingredients:

• 1 14 oz can chopped tomatoes in juice, no salt added, undrained
• 5 cloves garlic thinly sliced
• dried Italian seasoning
• oregano
• olive oil
• red pepper flakes (He used a pinch in his sauce. I forgot to put them in and it was still great so if you don't prefer a bit of heat, no worries. Also if you don't have red pepper flakes, I'm sure a dash or two of hot sauce would be ok. Just don't overpower. You want to taste the other flavors.)

My Version of Chef Scott's Method:

In medium saucepan, add garlic slices and enough olive oil to cover garlic. you don't want toasted garlic, just softened and adding its flavor to the oil. Heat on medium heat until oil starts to sizzle slightly, then remove briefly from heat. Swirl pan. Back on heat. Repeat until you can really smell the garlic, but garlic is still soft. Take off heat and set aside. The resulting garlic oil will be used two ways. Unlike Chef Scott I kept the garlic in the oil. Since my sauce was being used for pizza not pasta, it added some chunky garlic goodness.

Now the Bread:

I used a section of leftover baguette. Cut lengthwise into two halves. Brush each half generously some of the garlic oil. Next, sprinkle each half with dried oregano. Set aside and prepare the rest of the pizza toppings.

The Sauce:

To the pan of leftover garlic oil and garlic, add the can of tomatoes, one palm or approx 1t ea of dried Italian seasoning and oregano, plus a pinch of red pepper flakes if using. Let simmer a bit to reduce the tomato juice a bit. Then start mashing the tomatoes. I started with a spoon, then went on to a potato masher. Continue to simmer a bit more until a thick sauce has been achieved. Remove from heat. After sauce has cooled for about 10 minutes, add two handfuls of grated parmesan cheese. The cheese will help bind sauce and garlic oil together.

Toppings:

This, naturally is up to you. There few things more personal than what a person prefers on a pizza. I went with what we had on hand, which happily coincided with what we were wanting anyway:

• chopped white onion
• sliced black olives
• pepperoni
• parmesan
• mozzarella

Assembly:

There's no right or wrong on assembling a pizza. A crust, sauce, then whatever you want however you want how much you want.

Our pizza sauce is chunky. I ended up splitting between the two baguette halves. It stood up well and actually took on a topping element as well as a sauce. The onion and olives were scattered over both halves. Then came the pepperoni and the mozzarella.

• First a layer of pepperoni over the veggies.
• Then generous slices of mozzarella.
• Finally another layer of pepperoni.

Nut was in heaven, especially after stealing a few slices of pepperoni! He also decided on his half, he wanted parmesan topping his pepperoni. No rules, remember?

Time to Bake:

Our French bread pizzas baked at 375 for 20 minutes with 5 minutes under the broiler. Once your beautiful pizza creations are our of the oven, remember to let them sit for at least 5 minutes. All that cheese is seriously hot. No one wants a blistered mouth! It will still be plenty hot for dinnertime.

Taste Tester Results: "Honey you can do this again!"

Score!!