How to Choose Tomatoes for Pizza

A pizza sauce has nowhere to hide. There's no long simmer, no dozen ingredients — just tomatoes, salt, and maybe a little oil. Which means the tomatoes have to be good. Here's how to choose them.

Start with whole peeled tomatoes

For the best sauce, buy whole peeled plum tomatoes in a tin and crush them yourself — by hand, or with a quick blitz. You get to control the texture, and whole tomatoes are almost always better quality than the pre-chopped kind, which are often firmer, lesser fruit held together with added calcium.

San Marzano and what to look for

San Marzano tomatoes, grown in the volcanic soil near Naples, are the classic pizza tomato: sweet, low in seeds, with a rich flavour and low acidity. Genuine ones carry a DOP stamp. They're worth trying — but "San Marzano style" or a good tin of Italian plum tomatoes will make a lovely sauce too. What you're really after is:

• Deep red colour, not orange
• A short ingredients list — tomatoes, tomato juice, maybe salt or basil. Avoid added sugar or thickeners.
• A sweet, not sharp, taste straight from the tin

Passata vs polpa vs whole

• Whole peeled — best control and quality; crush to your preferred texture.
• Passata — smooth, sieved tomato. Convenient and good for a silky, even sauce.
• Polpa — chopped/crushed tomato, thicker. Fine in a pinch, but taste it — quality varies.

Don't cook it

This surprises people: a Neapolitan-style pizza sauce is raw. You crush the tomatoes, season with a good pinch of salt, maybe a drizzle of olive oil and a few basil leaves, and that's it. It finishes cooking on the pizza in the fierce heat of the oven, keeping the flavour bright and fresh. Cooking it down first just dulls it.

Buy the best tin you can, crush by hand, salt it, and leave it alone. A great tomato barely needs your help.