While pasta may be our first love when it comes to Italian food, we definitely have a soft spot for pizza too! We love making homemade pizza and experimenting with different toppings but there’s another way to get creative with pizza: the sauce. Changing up your sauce can completely change your pizza, making it lighter for summer, letting your toppings shine, or giving it bolder flavour. Ready to try something new with your pizza? Try these five great sauce alternatives.
1. Other tomato-based sauces
Traditional pizza sauce is made using canned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, onion, and herbs like basil and oregano but there are so many other tomato sauce options that offer different flavour profiles. A good place to start is to try some prepared pasta sauces from the grocery store. Authentica Siciliana, for example, is a basic tomato sauce that’s slightly sweeter than traditional pasta sauce. These milder flavoured sauces let pretty much any topping shine but there are some bolder tomato sauce options too: Arrabiata and Puttanesca. These sauces add a lot of flavour to pizza, making them ideal for simple toppings like creamy fresh mozzarella.
2. Pesto
If you love pasta tossed in fresh, aromatic pesto or a summery caprese salad drizzled with it, you’ll be happy to know it also makes a great pizza sauce! It’s a versatile sauce that pairs well with healthy options for toppings like mushrooms, blistered cherry tomatoes, or sausage. You can even try feta cheese and olives if you like stronger flavours.
3. Alfredo
Though it’s not one of the healthy options, Alfredo makes for a rich and creamy pizza sauce. The classic topping option here is cubed chicken but it’s nice to add a bit of colour with spinach, tomatoes or some red pepper flakes.
4. Tapenade
Olive tapenade is savoury and complex in a way that only a Mediterranean creation can be. If you’re feeling adventurous, it’s a great option for a pizza sauce that stands up to bold cheeses like goat and feta and grilled veggies like eggplant and zucchini.
5.Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
For the purist or on days when you really want your veggie toppings to take center stage, a high quality EVOO might be just the answer. The key here is to go for a truly high-quality oil with a robust flavour, not the usual milder flavoured oil you use to dress salads. Lightly drizzle your pizza crust with this flavourful oil and enjoy a delicious, crispy crust. While it might seem counterintuitive, if done right, this type of pizza can be considered one of the healthy options for pizza sauce alternatives.
These are just a few pizza sauce alternatives but there are so many others! Find your favourite by experimenting with different flavours and topping combinations.
