Sips & Pies' top-secret pizza sauce recipe

After sharing the Sips & Pies dough recipe and process, a reader emailed me and asked for advice about making pizza sauce.

Not to sound clickbaity, but the answer will surprise you. I know it surprised me.

When I first started making pizza at home, I approached sauce like I would for pasta — I got a can of crushed tomatoes, put it in a pot, added a wide variety of spices and seasonings and let it simmer for a few hours.

But as I continued down the rabbit hole of what some of the best pizza makers in the world do, I learned the best approach for Neapolitan-style pizza was to let the tomatoes do all the work for you. It doesn't need to simmer for hours. You don't need to add a bunch of extras.

So here's our top-secret pizza sauce recipe:

• 1 can of Bianco DiNapoli Crushed Tomatoes (the blue can)
• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt

That's it. Open the can, add the salt, mix it around and you're ready to go. You can do all of this just minutes before adding it to the pizza. In fact, it's best if you use sauce that's at room temp. Cold sauce can create all sorts of issues, like a gum line on your dough, an uneven bake, or a watery center because the sauce spends the bake warming up instead of evaporating excess moisture.

When baking a Neapolitan pizza, even though the pizza spends very little time in the oven, it's at a higher temp so the sauce cooks just enough to balance its natural sweetness and acidity.

You don't have to use that specific can of tomatoes. You can use whatever you prefer; it's just what we prefer (and we've tried many different brands/cans).

The conversation is different, however, if we're talking Detroit-style pizza. I take a more traditional approach to the sauce I ladle on top.

I'll start by adding some extra-virgin olive oil and some butter to a pan, let that heat until the butter stops bubbling, then add some shallots, or sometimes a white/yellow onion, depending on what we have.

Give that a minute or two to cook down, then I'll add garlic and let that go for a minute or two. Next, I add some tomato paste and stir it around, letting it darken a bit, before adding a can of crushed tomatoes(Bianco's blue can) and a can of whole peeled tomatoes with basil (Bianco's yellow can).

Once it gets all bubbly, I'll turn it to low and let it simmer. Next, I add some fine sea salt and dried oregano.

Finally, I take an immersion blender and pulse it a few times to break up the whole tomatoes. You could, of course, crush them by hand before you add them to the pan, but I prefer the consistency I get from the blender.

Let that simmer for an hour or so and you have a thick, delicious sauce for any kind of pan pizza.