Make your own delicious home canned pizza sauce from fresh tomatoes OR tomatoes that were frozen during the gardening season to reduced the cooking time. Details and tips on how to strain tomatoes and then cook and can the sauce to be ready for your next pizza night!
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Together with my favorite salsa, roasted tomato sauce, and addictive tomato chutney, this easy, wonderfully seasoned home canned pizza sauce forms the MVP’s of my canning recipes.
Meaning, during the tomato harvest, I make enough of these four staples to see us through the year and only if I have any tomatoes left do I make other things like bruschetta topping or rotel.
However, for a number of reasons (time issues, weird tomato season, other commitments), I couldn’t find the time to make all our tomato recipes one year when the tomatoes were coming in fast and furious.
We were almost out of the other canned goods, but I had a few cans of pizza sauce left, so I concentrated on the other tomato recipes and just froze enough bags of paste tomatoes (with a few heirlooms thrown in for great flavor) to be able to make the sauce later.
In January when things are typically more quiet, I pulled out the frozen tomatoes and decided to show you how to make the pizza sauce from frozen tomatoes.
You can actually make this sauce from fresh tomatoes, too, but frozen is my preferred way now since it makes the cooking down part go so much quicker. Read on for all the details!
How to Make Home Canned Pizza Sauce
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A few years ago I learned that freezing tomatoes before making sauce is a quicker way to a thick sauce.
Since then I’ve frozen our paste tomatoes at least a day or two before making sauce, even during canning season because less time cooking is a good thing! (Of course this is optional and you can make this sauce from fresh tomatoes as well.)
Detailed quantities and instructions are included in the full recipe box below, but here are a few extra tips to help with each step:
Step 1: Puree & Strain Tomatoes
To Use Frozen Tomatoes
- Thaw tomatoes (overnight is good) in a bowl or the sink (in case the bags leak).
- Drain the accumulated clear juices- open one corner of the baggie and pour off the juice.
- Run through a food mill to remove the seeds and skins.
Pictured above on the left is a Victorio Food Strainer and Sauce Maker. It’s like the little girl with the curl: when it’s good, it’s very very good and when it’s bad…well, you know. Even though the author in the post I linked to above didn’t heat her frozen tomatoes, this food mill just didn’t want to work with them until I heated them a bit.
I ended up reverting back to my vintage metal tripod food press (which you can still buy new here – guess some designs have staying power!) for some of the cold pulp, but it takes more elbow grease, that’s for sure, and doesn’t result in as much usable pulp as the Victorio (I did use the Victorio for applesauce for the first time this year and it worked wonderfully for that!).
To Use Fresh Tomatoes
- Wash, core, and halve tomatoes.
- Bring to a boil in a large stock pot.
- Strain skin and seeds through a food mill.
UPDATE – this may be the easiest way to get tomato sauce ever:
I used the electric FreshTech Harvest Pro Sauce Maker with both the fresh tomatoes shown in the video as well as 12 bags of frozen tomatoes later and it worked fabulous with them both. I had sauce in no time without needing to bother with heating in any form. I truly do love this machine – it really makes this easy!
Step 2: Make Pizza Sauce
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Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil for a few minutes and then add the tomato puree and all the seasonings. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and then simmer 30 minutes.
Blend the sauce to make it smooth (yes, you’ll appreciate the smooth sauce on the pizza). You can carefully transfer batches to a blender or you can do what I do – use an immersion hand-held blender right in the pot.
Bring back to a boil, then reduce the heat to simmer the sauce on low until it thickens to your desired consistency. This will take 1-2 hours, depending on if you started with frozen tomatoes (less time) or fresh (more time). It also will depend on how juicy the tomatoes were you started with – paste tomatoes take less time, slicing are juicier and will take longer.
Step 3: Water Bath Can the Sauce
You can always freeze the sauce – let it cool and transfer to freezer safe containers for up to a year – but for the most convenience, can the pizza sauce to be shelf stable.
I’ve found that half-pint 8-ounce or 12-ounce jars are good sizes for medium-to-large pizzas. The 12-oz. jars are actually the perfect size (whole pints are too much, which causes the dough to not cook fully in the center) but they’re harder to find, so use what you have.
How much to make?
We make this easy homemade pizza a couple times each month, though sometimes we make it with pesto instead of tomato sauce, and so I aim to have 20-24 jars on our shelves in varying sizes to last a year.
Oh, and this sauce is also good in any Italian recipe, so it finds its way into things other than pizza – a lot.
More Easy Canned Tomato Recipes
- Water-Bath Safe Canned Roasted Tomato Sauce
- Addictive Tomato Chutney
- Nice and Thick Salsa for Canning
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Nigel Gildon editor:Nigel Gildon is the editor of Chef Wayne’s Big Mamou: Chef Wayne’s Big Mamou. He has worked in the publishing industry for many years and has a passion for helping new authors get their work into the hands of readers. 63 Liberty Street * Springfield, MA 01003
