San Marzano tomato sauce: just three ingredients

One of the questions we hear most at Desidero is what goes into our tomato sauce. The answer surprises everyone: tomato, salt and basil. Nothing else. Neapolitan sauce is never cooked before it enters the oven — it cooks on the pizza, during the 90 seconds it spends inside.

Why San Marzano

San Marzano DOP tomatoes grow in volcanic soil at the foot of Vesuvius. They are elongated and fleshy, with few seeds and a natural balance of sweetness and acidity no other tomato can match. That is why the sauce needs no sugar, no soffritto, no correction of any kind.

If you cannot find San Marzano DOP, look for good-quality whole tinned plum tomatoes. Avoid commercial crushed tomato: it usually includes bitter skins and seeds.

Ingredients

• One 800 g tin of whole peeled San Marzano DOP tomatoes
• 8 g fine sea salt (1% of the tomatoes' weight)
• 6 fresh basil leaves
• A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil (optional)

Method

1. Drain the tomatoes lightly, reserving the juice.
2. Crush them by hand or with a food mill. Never with a blender: it shatters the seeds and turns the sauce bitter, while aerating it into an odd pink.
3. Add the salt and the basil, torn with your fingers.
4. Adjust the texture with the reserved juice: it should flow, but never be watery.

That is all. No heat. Raw sauce keeps the tomato's living fruit, which concentrates in the oven exactly as much as it should.

The "more is better" mistake

A Neapolitan pizza carries 80–90 g of sauce, spread in a spiral with the back of a ladle, leaving a 2 cm rim free. More sauce does not mean more flavour: it means a soggy pizza that never rises.

On our menu, the Marinara — tomato, garlic, oregano and oil — is the ultimate test of a sauce: there is no cheese to hide behind.