Freshest Ingredients

Sal’s conviction that fresh ingredients = best taste is the driving factor behind the Sal’s Pizza purchasing strategy. For example, Sal thought he had the best process for making the freshest sauce around, until he found an even better way! Sal’s approach was to procure only “top of the barrel” tomatoes for his sauce. (Note: It is customary in the sauce manufacturing industry to use the squished and partially rotted tomatoes at the bottomed of the harvest for sauce making.) He was certain “top of the barrel” tomatoes made the freshest, best-tasting tomato sauce. Then he was introduced to a company in California who has perfected the science of “fresh packing” just-picked tomatoes from only a small group of select growers; growers who’s limited harvest meets rigid standards with regard to the sweetness/acidity ratio, yielding the best and freshest tasting tomatoes you can buy.

When food is processed for consumption it undergoes pasteurization, which is the application of time and temperature. Time and temperature are taste killers! Our tomato supplier has invested millions upon millions of dollars in a proprietary state-of-the-art process that allows them to pasteurize the tomatoes with the absolute least amount of time and absolute least amount of temperature! The result is tomatoes that taste like they were just picked from the vine and chopped by hand right before your very eyes.

It is common practice in the sauce manufacturing industry to pasteurize at high temperatures for an extended period of time, which results in a tomato paste or tomato concentrate, which later must be reconstituted with water. It is significantly less expensive to transport paste versus fresh diced tomatoes, and many pizzerias only care about cost. However, the negative effect on flavor is astounding – even more so when you consider the quality of the water (or lack thereof) used to reconstitute the paste into a sauce. We won’t have anything to do with that!

And that’s just our tomatoes!
We make our dough from scratch every day by combining 50lb pound bags of flour, water, yeast and 100% extra virgin olive oil imported from Italy (for flavor and moisture) into mixers at our commissary kitchen. The dough is cut into pieces, weighed and rolled into individual dough balls then placed into bins to be shipped to the restaurants per their custom order.

We use only 100% mozzarella cheese and grind it to order every day. We never add any artificial coating to our cheese to keep it from clumping! Why not? Because the coating not only masks the fresh flavor of the cheese it causes it to burn during cooking. Ever had a pizza with black blotches on top? That’s because the cheese has an unnatural (sometimes chemical) coating on it. Ever bought shredded cheese at the supermarket? Did you ever wonder why the shards stay so fluffy in the package? It’s because they have an unnatural coating on them! We wouldn’t even consider it!