Your menu options are the lifeblood of your pizza business. You probably consult with your distributor diligently to select crust types and pizza dough products that work best with your recipes and help maximize your kitchen’s efficiency.
It’s a wise business practice that you can also apply to sauces. For example, while there is unlikely to be a single best commercial pizza sauce, there may be the best ready-made or fully prepared pizza sauce for the specific needs of your kitchen and operation.
Which method for perfecting the sauce is also the most time- and cost-effective for your business? First, let’s compare freshly prepared sauces to fully prepared sauces.
Scratch-Made Pizza Sauces
Pizza makers take pride in their homemade pizza sauces, often laboring over generations-old family recipes, perfecting the balance of garlic, basil, and oregano, and creating a taste that is unique to their pizzeria.
The cooking — or, in the case of “fresh” pizza sauces, the lack of cooking — distinguishes many scratch-made sauces.
Which is the best?
The best cooked sauces are often simmered for hours to produce deep, robust flavors and the distinct brownish-orange color that customers recognize. The long, slow cooking process has the added benefit of filling your establishment with the tantalizing aroma of ripe tomatoes and herbs, whetting appetites, and promoting your pizza offerings without saying a word.
On the other hand, fresh sauce supporters argue that cooked sauce can taste scorched.
The fresh, uncooked sauce is synonymous with bright, vine-ripened tomato flavor. Makers can select from fresh-picked garden tomatoes or peak-season “fresh pack” tomato products. These “fresh pack” products are canned at peak ripeness using low-heat methods to produce a bright red, farm-fresh tasting tomato sauce that does not need to be cooked before use.
Canned products for fresh sauce? Yes!
The key to fresh flavor is to use “fresh pack” products and all-natural ingredients. Reconstituted and remanufactured products, which are made from tomato paste diluted down to sauce long after tomato season has ended, simply cannot produce the same lively, fresh-tasting results as fresh-pack products.
Fresh sauce fans describe it as flavorful and authentic, whereas cooked sauce fans believe fresh sauce is too watery and often bland for pies.
Fully Prepared, Ready-Made Pizza Sauce
Whether you choose cooked or uncooked sauce, making scratch-made pizza sauce takes time and labor — which can be difficult for busy kitchens and those in a labor crunch.
Some pizza restaurants use pre-made tomato bases and add their own signature spice blends to create a distinct flavor all their own. This solution saves time, but consistency from batch to batch can be difficult due to the many variables that can occur in the kitchen.
If you’re looking for variety in ready-to-use sauces, it’s helpful to know that manufacturers frequently include Alfredo and pizza sauces in their ready-to-use options. Some manufacturers, such as kipspizza, will even collaborate with you to develop and create custom pizza and pasta sauces based on your own favorite recipes, ensuring that these easy-to-use sauces deliver the unique, signature flavors you already know your customer’s love, ready in a fraction of the time!
Not All Sauces are Created Equal: Pizza vs. Pasta
With all of its benefits, fully prepared pizza sauce may appear to be ideal for use on both pizzas and pasta dishes. However, there are several significant differences between pasta sauce and pizza sauce:
- Water content: Pasta sauce is higher in water and lower in pulp than pizza sauce.
- Flavor: Pasta sauces, like marinara sauce, are enhanced by flavors like onion, garlic, and herbs to a greater extent than uncooked tomato-based pizza sauce.
- Texture: Compared to pasta sauces, pizza sauce has a higher fat content from olive oil, making it thick and pulpy. Tomato-based pasta sauce has less fat, is thinner, and has a smoother mouth feel.
But just because pizza and pasta require different qualities in their sauces doesn’t mean you have to spend your time in the kitchen making separate pasta sauces from scratch. Instead, many manufacturers offer fully prepared, ready-made pasta sauces as part of their product lines.
Check with your distributor to see if they sell pre-made pasta sauces made with the same high-quality ingredients, attention to detail, and quality assurance as their pizza sauces, for results that rival homemade sauces. So you can meet your customers’ expectations for aroma, flavor, and consistency in pasta dishes and pizzas!
Both scratch-made and fully prepared sauces can deliver a powerful flavor punch, but only fully prepared sauce can help you achieve a more efficient operation by streamlining your inventory, cutting costs, and saving time — all without sacrificing quality or consistency.
Learn more: Premium vs. Commodity: How Ingredients Define Your Pizza