Home Canned Pizza Sauce {from frozen or fresh tomatoes}

Make your own home canned pizza sauce from fresh tomatoes OR tomatoes that were frozen during the gardening season for convenience and reduced cooking time.

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 last fall 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 I 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 (using frozen or fresh tomatoes)

A few years ago I learned from my friend online Gina 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.)

To Make from Frozen (affiliate links included)

1. Thaw tomatoes (overnight is good) in a bowl or the sink (in case the bags leak).
2. Drain the accumulated clear juices- open one corner of the baggie and pour off the juice.
3. 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 Gina mention (in the post I linked to above) that she 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 Make from Fresh Tomatoes

1. Wash, core, and halve tomatoes.
2. Bring to a boil in a large stock pot.
3. Strain skin and seeds through a food mill.

July 2016 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!

For convenience, can the pizza sauce in half-pint or 12-oz jars which is a good size for medium-to-large sized 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.

If you’re new to canning this tutorial will take you through each step.You can also watch all the easy steps to water-bath canning in this video:

We make our 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.

Oh, and this sauce is also good in any Italian recipe, so it finds its way into things other than pizza – a lot.

Click the arrow for the full, printable recipe!

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