When reading recipes on the internet where they talk about pizza sauce and tomato sauce, it can get a bit confusing. It would sometimes appear that they are almost the same dish and used in the same way so why can they be used like they are the same thing? I can assure you we are are talking about two completely different items here…

• Pizza sauce is very simple in construction. As you can see from my pizza sauce recipe, there are as little as 4 ingredients in the prefect sauce. When you make a tomato sauce while the base tomato’s can be the same, you will want to add and build the flavours, possibly including a range of herbs, spices, stocks or flavourings. With a tomato sauce you are building levels of flavour and trying to achieve a completely different aim.
• Pizza sauce is a raw product. When you make a pizza sauce you will be cooking it on the pizza in the oven, where as a tomato sauce can be cooked quickly or left blipping away for hours to cook down and made rich and delicious.
• Pizza sauce is designed to be something completely different to tomato sauce. Pizza sauce is supposed to be light, fresh and a bit zingy where as tomato sauce can be thick rich and substantial or meaty or herby.
• Pizza sauce, whilst usually based on tomatoes, does not have to be a tomato sauce. Pizza sauce can be a variety of bbq sauce, béchamel sauce or even a herby butter sauce. A tomato sauce will obviously contain and be a variation of tomato sauce.
• Last pizza sauce is only used on pizza, where as a tomato sauce can be used in a wide range of dishes and can be called different things. Tomato sauce can be tomato puree, tomato paste, marinara, tomato and basil, the list is almost endless when considering variations. Tomato sauce is also used in a variety of dishes – meat, pasta, chicken, vegetables,