I agree there’s a big difference in taste between SMs and standard tomatoes. I find that canned San Marzanos generally have an acidic mineral profile…think Muir Glen and Cento. DiNapoli has really great product, they have a San Marzano style line and a California tomato line which are both great. I suppose I just reject the idea that San Marzanos are the end all be all for pizza sauce. I prefer canned tomatoes with a bit more sweetness and robust ripe tomato flavor.
hot-ish oven from today. closer to neopolitan than any other style but distinctly not neopolitan. pretty crispy bottom and holds up real nice.
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David Tanis dough recipe, Pomi chopped reduced by about 50%, Mulay Italian sausage, mushrooms, onion, full-fat brick mozzarella, pizza stone at 500°.
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I actually like those San Marzanos better than most canned italian San Marzanos… My favorite for sauce (Pizza and Pasta) are Bianco. There are italian bottled ones and I LOVE fresh roma tomato sauce, but it costs much more and not always available.
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I like Cento crushed tomatoes. Crush one clove of garlic . Add a liberal amount of salt to the sauce. olive oil . Let sit for one hour at room temp . Spread on pizza and into the oven . I loathe cooked pizza sauce .
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Yeah… not a fan of Cento… they taste sour… but I also don’t like a cooked sauce… We blitz it and add fresh made garlic oil just for a second. Raw Garlic is bit too punchy for me.
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Peter Reinhart’s recipe include a touch of wine vinegar. I don’t do it with Neapolitans but with New York, Detroit, or neo-Neapolitan it is delicious.
Do you have a mortar and pestle? Crushing garlic in that is quite a bit smoother but still has great flavor.
Hope you are fully recovered!
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I do!! And I use it to crush garlic in marinades/adobos/recados… amazing! I also have a garlic press that I love to add a half head of garlic into the rice cooker for garlic rice. Garlic is an essential ingredient in our home… But even when I process cloves for dinner, I use the crush and then peel method to get rid of some of that piquant fresh garlic taste… LOL!!
Thank you so much for asking… we are almost there! We were SUPER lucky… Mild symptoms we lost our sense of smell only for a week and it’s about 75% back… I can smell that P just grabbed a spoonful of Peanut Butter behind my back just right now… LOL!! And Whole Foods delivery has been a god sent… They have Bianco Tomatoes… LOL!!
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You guys are bringing back a lot of memories with this thread. For several years before I retired, we built 2 new units in which we installed gas fired pizza ovens from Woodstone up in Bellingham, WA. It’s a mammoth piece of equipment before installation, but once installed it is probably one of the simplest and easiest pieces of equipment to operate…which was good for me since a good portion of my staff was unskilled labor 
(i.e. think students with no previous work experience)
But luckily for us, Woodstone has great support and more importantly, some really good recipes that work in a volume setting. We ended up going with their West Coast Dough, which was 3/4 hard winter wheat from General Mills and 1/4 GM semolina, SAF instant, water, oil and salt, which yielded about 25 - 1# dough balls. We’d let the dough rest for 45 minutes to an hour before portioning. We also played around with fermenting, the shortest time being 18 hours the longest being 72. We eventually settled on a 36-48 hour ferment.
For sauce we tried a number of different tomato products that left our sauce lacking no matter what we did to it. Woodstone suggested that we try the Stanislaus 74*40 tomato filets which are probably one of the more expensive canned tomato products out there. And, unless you want a #10 can, they aren’t not available retail. But, wouldn’t you know it, they were exactly what we needed, and as so often happens, in the long range scheme of things, they were actually more cost effective than the cheaper ones.
We ran our ovens in the 650* range depending upon the time of day and how quickly we needed to get pies out. We did a 6 cut and between the 2 units probably churned out about 600 slices on an average day. One unit had a full blown pasts station next to the pizza oven and we used it to finish some pasta dishes when we had the time, which was not during the heighth of service. But when it was slower we could. We also tried, unsuccessfully, to harness the power of the residual heat of the oven with some overnight experiments. We gave up after we accidentally incinerated a pork shoulder.
Thanks for letting me take a walk down memory lane, I’ll return you now to your normally scheduled pizza discuss 
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Can I ask where these are available retail? I vaguely recall hearing they’re only available for commercial kitchens and just accepted that. Now I see some absurdly overpriced ones on Amazon and some more reasonable ones on webstaurantstore.com but if there’s somewhere folks can grab them in person I’d certainly appreciate knowing!
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Oh yeah I was trying to remember the name but that’s it. Fueled my wet dreams for several years after I first encountered it in an appliance store. Thanks for the reminder. Can you post any pics of your setup please? Would love to get an inspiration for a a practical real world application.
I don’t believe the Stanislaus tomato products are canned for the retail market. As far as I know - and I’ve been out of the biz for 3+ years - they only can in #10 cans. If you’re okay with that size and have the ability to use it, try Smart & Final or Restaurant Depot. I took a look at their website and they don’t show a size other than #10, which is usually in the 6 lb 12 oz range.
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Let me see if I have any photos left. I may have deleted most of them
hope you have some left
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Thanks! We don’t always go full #10 can but we keep them around and I’ll take a wack at it if I see them
I can say that the pizza sauce we made froze really well, so if you do find a #10 can, you can and you like the results, you can always make extra and freeze it.
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Passata di pomodoro, staple of almost every Italian kitchen. That’s exactly what Pomi is.
That’s what Mozza uses.
When I want a mellow garlic flavor, I put salt in the mortar, squish the garlic on top of it with a press, pound to a paste, and cover with olive oil to keep it from oxidizing. Typically I use that when I’m not going to cook it, for example for pesto or hummus.