Expand and enhance your menu with your house-made sauces
If you’ve never put pasta sauce on a pizza, why not? Personally, sauce is one of my favorite things to make and eat. Our motto at my shop is, “Don’t mess with the sauce,” and I’ve created a whole side hustle out of our bottled sauce. Even if your love of sauce doesn’t extend as far as mine, sauces are still a great way to expand and enhance your menu.
Sauce can mean a lot of things, but at its core, it is a blanket of concentrated flavors that can amplify any meal. Sauces add flavor, texture, viscosity and visual appeal.
Go Beyond Marinara
Marinara is the first sauce that comes to mind in a pizzeria, but don’t discount white sauces and even pesto when it comes to diversifying your uses. Just like everything else in my shop, I like to cross-utilize sauces across the menu. This means not only using sauces on multiple pizzas but also with other items.
Making sauces into dips is an easy one – whether it’s for garlic knots, breadsticks or calzones. I always think the more sauce the better. If you make pasta at your shop, this is a no-brainer. There’s also nothing like a flavorful sauce to juice up a sandwich.
We use marinara on our meatball grinder pesto on our veggie sandwich and vodka sauce on our eggplant parm. Depending on the type and consistency of the sauce, you can use it to toss wings, marinate meats or add flavor to roasted veggies.
Sauce Talk
The beauty of sauce is that you can play the long or the short game and still come out with a fantastic product. Depending on what you’re making and how much time you have, you can simmer it for hours or put it together on the fly. If you’re making your pizza sauce out of canned tomatoes (and, realistically, most of us are), usually you aren’t even cooking it, just combing and blending with spices.
There are, of course, a few exceptions to that rule. One being: If you are adding raw vegetables such as onion or garlic to your sauce, sautéing them creates a depth of flavor and removes some of the bitterness from allium, replacing it with sweetness. Adding meat to your sauce is another reason to cook it down.
With cooked and simmered sauces, the process can be as important as the ingredients. I always like to start with the fat. If you’re adding meat – whether it’s guanciale, ground beef or something else – begin with a hot pan. The meat should sizzle when it hits the pan, and the fatty parts should immediately start to melt. Once the fat is rendered, you can begin to add other ingredients such as onions, carrots or garlic, sautéing to build layers of flavor. Don’t rush these first few steps, as they set the tone for the entire sauce. If the heat is too high and the veggies or meat get charred, the whole sauce will carry a slightly burned taste.
On the other end, if you don’t sauté the onions long enough or fully render the fat, you will end up with unpleasantly chewy pieces of meat or a bitter flavor from undercooked allium. The sweet spot is when the onions are translucent, tender and buttery and the meat is falling apart.
Now is a great point to add in any stock or alcohol you want to use. Letting it reduce slowly will distill and concentrate the flavors. If you are making a red sauce, the tomatoes are naturally acidic. Most other sauces can use a hit of acid such as lemon juice to balance and enhance the flavors. Finishing a sauce with butter or another fat can pull the whole thing together – and always remember to season in stages. You don’t want to over-salt in the beginning, as more flavors will emerge as your sauce progresses.
Using the Sauce
Once you have the base of your sauce, think about how and when you’re going to use it. I think it’s easier to apply a pasta sauce to a pizza than vice versa, since pizza sauces tend to be a bit heavier and uncooked. If you like to streamline things, branching out with a pizza/pasta special using a classic Italian sauce is a great place to start (see recipe for Amantriciana sauce below).
You can make your sauces as simple or complex as you want to fit your needs. Once you’ve landed on a great sauce recipe, it’s up to you to cross-utilize it all over your menu.
Even though the sauce I make for pizza differs from what I put on pasta, it doesn’t mean you need to make two entirely different sauces. You can make a base sauce and then take half to finish for the pizza line and the other half to finish orders on the pasta line.
If the end product is meant to be creamier, I usually like to add heavy cream directly to the sauce before putting it on my pizza. This makes the pizza line move faster during a rush and creates a more consistent product. For pasta, I take the base sauce (without heavy cream) and finish it with butter or a hard cheese at the end.
No matter what sauce you decide to make, the care you put into your ingredients and process will make all the difference. Just remember, great sauce can transform a dish.
Amatriciana Sauce
I first fell in love with this sauce during a trip to Rome. The deeply savory flavor of the guanciale and sharp, salty tang of Pecorino were unlike any other sauce I’d had. Once I returned, I manically tried to recreate it and then adapt it to put on pizza. While the version I cook for pasta is closer to the traditional Roman sauce, the one I make for my pizzeria is a creamier iteration. For the pizza, I decided to deconstruct the sauce as toppings as well by adding whole bacon strips (decidedly American) and finishing pies with shaved Pecorino and chili oil.
Get the Amatriciana Sauce recipe.
AUDREY KELLY owns Audrey Jane’s Pizza Garage in Boulder, Colorado.
