Raw tomato sauce — the recipe
The shortest recipe on this site, and the one most often ruined by effort: Neapolitan pizza sauce is a can of good tomatoes, crushed by hand, salted, and nothing else. It goes on raw — the 90 seconds in a roaring oven are all the cooking it ever gets.
As always here, it's weighed: one reference batch below, and the per-pizza doses come straight from the classic recipes, so this page and the pizza pages always agree.
What goes in
One batch — makes about 400 g:
one standard can — San Marzano if the budget smiles, but a good can beats a famous label
about 1% — taste your can first, some arrive salted
Scaling up is linear — double everything for a double batch.
Where it goes
The classics that use it, with the dose each one takes at its default size — the same numbers their recipe pages scale to your dough:
| Pizza | Per pizza | Batch covers |
|---|---|---|
| Margherita | 80 g | × 5 |
| Marinara | 90 g | × 4 |
| Diavola | 80 g | × 5 |
| Prosciutto e funghi | 70 g | × 5 |
How it’s done
- Tip the can into a bowl, juice and all.
- Crush the tomatoes by hand, squeezing each one through your fingers until the sauce is pulpy but not smooth. Fish out any hard cores and stray bits of skin.
- Stir in the salt, let it stand 15 minutes, then taste and adjust.
- Use it raw — the sauce cooks on the pizza, never in a pot.
Keeps 4–5 days in the fridge, or three months frozen flat in a zip bag.
Questions from the counter
Why raw? Every other recipe simmers it.
Because it finishes cooking on a pizza in a ferociously hot oven — simmering it first means cooking it twice, and the bright, fresh tomato note is exactly what a margherita is about. Long-cooked sauce belongs on pasta.
Do I need San Marzano tomatoes?
No — you need a good can. Real San Marzano is wonderful and widely counterfeited; a trustworthy whole-peeled tomato you've tasted beats a dubious label. Whole peeled over pre-crushed, though: you can feel the quality with your hands.
Can I use a blender instead of my hands?
A few pulses, fine — but stop well before smooth. A blender aerates the sauce pale pink and razes the texture; hands (or a food mill, the nonna option) leave the pulp that makes the bake taste of tomato rather than tomato juice.
Put it on a pizza
The dough is the calculator’s job and the toppings are weighed on the recipe pages — this batch is ready for any of the classics above.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!
Impasto is a free pizza dough calculator for Neapolitan, New York, Roman, Sicilian, Detroit, thin crust and focaccia doughs — flour, water, salt and yeast weighed in baker's percentages, with the fermentation schedule written for you.