No Sugar Added Pizza Sauce

After perusing many pizza sauce recipes online, I came up with the following no-sugar-added combination to use on our whole-wheat pizza crust. 

finished product

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
• ¾ cup chopped onion
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 14 oz. can petite diced tomatoes
• 1 tablespoon tomato or V-8 juice
• ½ teaspoon dried basil, thyme, and oregano - use fresh herbs instead, if possible
• ½ teaspoon salt
• freshly ground pepper - about ¼ teaspoon
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste

Directions

Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add onion and cook until softened--about 3 to 4 minutes. Add garlic, sauté 1 minute more.

Stir in tomatoes, tomato juice, and seasonings. Add a small amount of water to tomato can (about ¼ cup) to swish around and rinse any remaining tomato residue. Add to pan.

Heat to boiling, reduce heat and simmer 1½ to 2 hours, stirring occasionally. I cooked the sauce another 15 minutes after taking the photo below--a total of about 1 hour 45 minutes.

sauce after cooking about 1½ hours

Cool sauce to room temperature. Add to blender with tomato paste (thaw paste first, if frozen). I had tomato paste stored in the freezer as suggested in one of my hints blog posts, so I put one in the blender to start thawing before I started cooking the sauce. I added the sauce to the blender and then let it finish cooling before blending. Pulse until smooth.

Use sauce immediately, or store in refrigerator in a glass jar until ready to use. I used it on my whole-wheat pizza crust the same day. 

I love this same, and this is what we use every time we have pizza. Feel free to share this post for others!