T.T.: Pizza and a Clean Stove

One of the items we get a LOT of in the excess commodities boxes given to us by our neighbors is low-sodium spaghetti sauce. It's not the best food item. It has sugar in it, which I don't really think is necessary, and it's kind of bland, so I add more salt and spices to it.

It does, however, work pretty well as a pizza sauce after those adjustments, but only when it's reduced a little. It's too watery in its original form.

I had not figured out a way to do that reduction, however, without making a HUGE mess of my stove. Spluttering tomato sauce is one of the worst things to simmer on a stove. Even with a sieve over it, the sauce would get through the tiny holes and get all over the place. 

I won't tell you how many times I just resigned myself to that and cleaned it all up afterwards before I figured out a better way. Which I did just last week.

So the sauce needs to have some water evaporated out of it, right? And the oven is on at a high temperature to bake pizza crusts, right? And what does the high heat of an oven do?

Right.

When I make pizza, I actually coat the entire surface of the dough with olive oil to keep it from drying out when it's doing the last rise in the pan. So what I did was bake the crusts most of the way at high heat, then spread the sauce on and bake it another five minutes or so before putting the toppings on. Because there is already oil on the crust, the sauce doesn't make the crust soggy before it dries out a bit.

Post-baking, pre-topping.

So many stove cleanings that could have been avoided if only I had worked smarter instead of harder, as they say.

Oh well. Better late than never, I suppose.