cooking my own pizza paste

most people when they make their own pizzas choose to use commercially produced pizza paste. i prefer to cook my own paste. when the price of tomatoes is low, like now - it is $1.00 per kilogram - it is time for me to make pizza paste. whenever my daughters saw me preparing the paste, they would know that it would be pizza eating time soon.


in the past, i would buy about 4 kilograms of tomatoes; this time around, i bought only 2 kilos. i will leave the tomotoes to ripen fully before i start cooking them.


first, i will boil a pot or container of water to blanch the tomotoes. this is to facilitate the removal of the skin. when the skin of the tomatoes in the boiling water starts to wrinkle or crack, i will fish it out and dump it into a basin of tap water.

after removing the skin - which is quite an easy task - i will cut the tomato into four parts.

next, i will chop some cloves of garlic and some onions. i do not cut them too fine. i cut about 10 cloves of garlic and 2 onions. i fry the chopped onions, first, in olive oil, and then the garlic bits. this will be followed by the tomatoes. the rest of the ingredients that are added are basil leaves, bay leaves and a small can of tomato puree. other ingredients added later but not shown here include salt, sugar and a dash of black pepper.

when it starts to boil, i will turn down the flame to let it simmer for about an hour. at first, the paste will be quite watery but at the end of the one hour of simmering, it will become quite dry.