The Secret to Great Pizza Sauce (+, how to open a can of tomato paste)

Haven’t written about food for a bit.  There’s a local Greek pizza place near me that is a bit of an institution, this despite the fact that the original family long since decamped.  But much of the original menu remains intact, and fragments of the family have gone on to run other places.  Right now they run a takeout place with what must be surely the world’s most stunning prices.  I walked in there once, more or less with the idea of buying a pizza, but I didn’t realize I’d have to invest to do it.  Their flyers—Sophie’s in Calgary—are still delivered to my door routinely.  The prices go up routinely, and they try to add a crummy menu item or two each time to make it look as if there’s something new and interesting.  I was once even in an expansive mood when I had a friend over and I suggested we just go for it and order one of their pizzas, but my friend, himself so shocked by the prices, basically just said he would have found it immoral to order at such prices.

Anyway, sorry for the intro. In cases of extreme economies like the one I live in, sometimes you just have to make your own pies. And, of course, so doing is a very satisfying, if time-consuming, endeavour.  If you don’t like taking the time to cook, or you don’t have time, well, that’s too bad.  In terms of making time to eating time, pizza must surely be amongst the world’s most disproportionate meals.  A girl I knew who once worked at a place like Sophie’s, but not Sophie’s, told me that the secret to the sauce was cinnamon.  Who knew?  I haven’t checked the web, but I’m sure google lists 45 billion posts about the use of cinnamon in pizza sauce.  Ok, so I’ll add to them.  It is true.  Cinnamon will definitely enhance your sauce, particularly the zest.  But a tiny amount goes a very, very long way.  For your entire pie, you would never want to add more than you’d put in your coffee, another great place to put cinnamon, which I gather is good for you.  Go really really light.  Use it, but go light, light.  Just get the scent.  Mix it, even cook it, first.  Just a bit.  A bit will enhance your enjoyment alot.  Works well with basil, too, but again, use basil sparingly; go with the tried and true pepper flakes and oregano and Italian spice etc.

So anyway, if you do make pizza and you haven’t tried cinnamon in your sauce, try it—but only use a tiny bit to start, because, strangely, the cinnamon taste will really take over if you add more than a few sprinkles.  Treat it like cayenne or something even stronger than that.

More wisdom imparted to me by another girl: how to open a can of tomato paste.  It’s true that you probably would not use tomato paste in pizza sauce (although, then again, really to impart that dark tomatoey richness, you might—never tried it myself, but one day maybe).  I was using some earlier tonight in some spaghetti sauce I was making.  Many moons ago, though, I was making chilli, and a girl I knew was with me and she showed me how to open those narrow cans of tomato paste.  If you only open the top, of course, the thick paste is hard to get out and so on.  You always end up scrabbling around and not getting it all out and so on and the can has to be rinsed forever etc.  What this girl showed me was how one simply has to open one end with a can opener, all the way so the whole top is cut, and then just flip the can over and do the same to the bottom, or the other end.  There’s never any chance of leakage or mess or anything (especially if you open over the pot/pan you’re cooking in) because the paste is so thick and glutinous.  Once the can opener has clicked through both ends of the can, one simply pushes on the metal at one end and watches and the whole can extrudes itself out the other end. One merely scrapes the two can ends off on the can itself or whatever, or with a knife, and presto, the whole can has been perfectly emptied and is easy to clean for recycling.  When this girl did this in front of me, it was a revelation.  I have no idea how many cans of tomato paste I’d opened up until then.  What she did was sublime—almost illegal, I thought.  I wonder if even tomato paste manufacturers know about this.  Yes, yes, I haven’t googled it, so yes, maybe I am the 30 millionth person to write this on the internet.  Anyway, I’m 30 000 001.  But if you’ve never done it before, it sure is fun to open your first can of tomato paste with utter perfection of results.
zr