You know that delicious garlic butter goo that you get with a Papa Johns' pizza??

Here. Watch this lovely review from a man who is clearly my British brother to refresh your memory about how damn delicious this "butter" sauce is...

So did you know it's not butter? It's actually just little homemade blend of soybean oil, water, salt, vegetable mono & diglycerides, garlic flavor, natural flavor, soy lecithin, lactic acid, sodium benozate, calcium disodium EDTA, citric acid, beta carotene, and a dash of vitamin A palmitate. 

If you're like me, when you're stuffing it down your gullet you just don't care.

That sh*t is delicious and my body craves it to the point that I was told once that while under the influence of a beer I drank two of these cups. I'm not proud.

Most of the food we LOVE these days isn't actually food. And it sure as hell isn't made in a kitchen. It's designed in a lab by scientists, not cooks, with one goal. To make our bodies feel like this while we're eating it: 

Even though an hour later, you, your grumbly tummy, and your toilet know that you were fooled. It's like the food scientists planned exactly how much time you need to get home to your bathroom.

Every day we're tricked into falling in love with the foods that hurt our bodies. I still fall for it. I'm writing this while sipping on a Diet Pepsi and eating Ruffles. The addictions these folks have been able to create around food are hurting us and our kids, and they're harder to quit than smoking. Trust me.

Which brings me to my point!

Pizza Sauce and Sugar

You may recall that when I was working on my line of frozen pizzas I taste tested over 200 pizzas in about 60 days. I need a gym so bad it's not funny.

I wanted my pizza to be as local and as natural as possible. But I also wanted to limit or eliminate all the unnecessary crap so many other companies add to their food. After all, I'm a cook who works in the garden, not a scientist who works in a lab.

It starts with the best tomato

I wanted to develop a pizza sauce that fit into our 'Poco' brand. I didn't want to mess with the tomato flavor. I wanted it to taste like the crushed tomatoes from Italy.

I couldn't cook it down into the paste we're used to here in Wisconsin. And I couldn't add a bunch of sugar to make our bodies crave it like they do everywhere else. 

What I ended up with was a pure tomato flavor that respects the fruit itself. It won't be everyone's cup of tea. Like I said, that sugar addiction is one hell of a beast to kick...

Our tomatoes are picked only when they're fully ripe, because they have the highest concentration of natural sugars then. Just as important, we only use tomatoes with the peel still on.

Why? Because I want fresh tomato flavor even in the dead of winter. That fresh flavor, in all tomatoes, is concentrated most heavily in that soft, super-thin layer just beneath the skin, called the "tomato velvet." When a tomato is peeled that flavor is peeled away, too, and what's left is something that needs sugar to make it taste good again.

When we make tomato juice here on the farm, our pigs get the leftover skins from many bushels of home-grown tomatoes. They fight each other for them because I've learned over the years that pigs know what's good.

Our Sauce Is Simple

We use whole crushed tomatoes, we add a little garlic, a little salt, and oregano. And that's it. We don't want it to be a secret. We don't cook it down into a paste. WE DON'T ADD SUGAR. If you feel like you're missing something when you taste it, you're missing sugar. 

But if you want something that is pure, and clean, and wholesome, then we've got just the thing!