I love tomatoes. I grow baskets of my own heritage varieties every single year. I sometimes partake in those locally confident pizza sauce recipes that essentially have you blend some fresh (or good canned) tomatoes with a whisper of herbs and an afterthought of salt. But to make a true tavern-style tomato sauce, you’ve really got to forget everything that the Food Network revolution taught you and bring your inner Hellraiser to the fore. 

Cook the bastard out of this. Make the ingredients loud. Add more if you like. Hit balance by adding more. And if that’s too much, add more of the complementary ingredient to lasso things back into balance. This is a sauce of wild haymakers to the palate, not a PBS demo on farm-to-table cooking. Cook for umami and taste for acid balance. Your guests will lose their minds. You can’t quality control mozzarella or Parmesan, but you can damn sure make sure people never forget your pizza sauce.