So what's the difference with commercial pizza sauce and something from the store? Are we talking about restaurant pizza sauce?
I've seen the large cans in pizza restaurants before. I think finding a good recipe and making from tomato sauce is much better then you can tailor it to your liking.
This is more interesting than you would think.
First of all, commercial sauce is not sauce. It's tomato paste. The two big companies pack it with big basil leaves included. The label says "sauce," though. You're expected to dilute it at least 1:1. You could use it with just water added, but people usually add seasonings. I usually add a little sugar. Sometimes I add oregano. Believe it or not, a touch of white vinegar or rice wine vinegar can be nice. I add fresh or powdered garlic. I like plain old NYC pizza, and the joints that make it don't always use the fanciest ingredients, so garlic powder works for me. Some people add onions or onion powder.
Second: the companies that make sauce also pack whole and crushed tomatoes. You can mash them up and use them as sauce. You can mix them with the paste.
Third--and this comes from sauce makers who admittedly have an axe to grind--the stuff you get in grocery stores is generally heated, condensed, and shipped a long way to canneries. Commercial sauce people grow their own tomatoes and can them close to the fields. Also, I suppose it matters that grocery tomatoes are broad-spectrum, whereas the sauce companies know they're making a pizza ingredient.
The two big players are Stanislaus and Escalon. Stanislaus makes several kinds of paste with slight differences. I like Saporito, their super-heavy economy paste. I like it better than Full Red or Super Dolce, which are supposed to be fancier. Escalon's big sauce product is called Bonta.
There are some other companies. At least one is in New Jersey, which is supposedly known for good tomatoes that don't ship well. I haven't tried them all. Stanislaus and Escalon are not hard to find in my state.
Stanislaus puts citric acid in its tomatoes. Bonta doesn't. I believe the reasoning is that you have to cook tomatoes harder to preserve them without citric acid, and that, according to Stanislaus, is bad for the flavor. Citric acid adds a little zing, though, and some people don't like it. If you've eaten a lot of Stanislaus sauce without knowing it, and you've gotten used to it, you may think there is something wrong with Bonta. I like Stanislaus.
I get my sauce at Gordon Food Supply, which also has Grande cheese, at least in some locations. Grande East Coast blend (mozzarella) is very good. It's half part-skim and half actual cheese, so it doesn't burn and turn into vinyl as quickly as most part-skim. Grande doesn't put starch powder or wood cellulose on its shredded cheese, the way nearly every store brand does. I believe this powder turns cheese into a composite, like fiberglass. In any case, it seems to ruin the texture.
I have been told you can fix store cheese by rinsing the powder off. I haven't tried it. Sliced store cheese will be better from the start.
Grande sells some other types of cheese, and I believe they sell blocks, too.
Cheese freezes very well. Some people prefer it to fresh. I use vacuum bags.
You get a huge number of pizzas from each #10 can. I freeze the sauce. I pour it into big plastic bags, mash them kind of flat, and freeze. This gives me big, thin slabs that are easy to cut with a knife. To make sauce, I cut chunks off and weigh what I need out on a cheap Escalia gram scale. The sauce lasts for weeks this way without noticeable deterioration. It will eventually get moldy in the fridge.
Saporito is also great for things like baked ziti.
Hope this helps.
