I had been making sourdough bread for several years and wanted to try making pizza. I thought it would be a simple step from bread making, honestly it's just the same sourdough, but at a lower hydration level. Man, was I ever wrong. Pizza starts with a solid sourdough but then adds in all kinds of other skills like shaping, toppings, oven temp, and sauce.

Sauce

So much of the flavor we expect from a pizza comes from the sauce. It turns out that the cans of fire roasted tomatoes you get at the supermarket have perfect ratio of tomato and water content.

I've settled on this simple red sauce:

Empty the fire roasted tomatoes into a sauce pan. Blend them lightly with an immersion blender. Add the salt and Italian Seasoning and simmer at low until the sauce reduces a bit.

Modernist Pizza

My wonderful wife surprised me with a the Modernist Pizza book set and that completely changed what I thought I knew about sourdough.

It's 35 pounds of details about all aspects of the pizza process. The authors are opinionated, but they have the chops to defend their opinions.