Fresh Tomato Sauce Focaccia with Parmesan Sesame Crust

A cloud-like slice with a salty, nutty crust gets topped with an intensely fruity & flavorful tomato sauce that doesn't take all day to make.

I’m calling this a focaccia to remain agnostic, though it’s really more of a pizza (somewhere in the world of Detroit-style, Sicilian, Roman Al Taglio or Grandma Pie — you get the idea). It’s one of my favorite ways to use focaccia dough, and I decided to show it a little extra care by giving it a fun crust and a scratch-made tomato sauce.

Which is a good segue to say: I think I really did something with this sauce. Real tomato heads often prefer the texture of a sauce passed through a food mill — it creates a nice rustic, yet uniformly crushed texture. Being that I have a small kitchen, I have a hard time justifying such limited-use appliances, so I don’t own a food mill myself. Another standard aspect of scratch-made sauce is steaming then peeling whole tomatoes and cooking them down at length. I’ve found a nice way to bipass both of these steps by grating the raw tomatoes on a standard box grater, which mimics the texture of a food mill quite nicely and sorts out the peels automatically. It’s also akin to the way I might make a quick jam (blending the fruit raw before cooking it down). I’m quite happy with the results, and the balance of this wonderfully fruity and flavorful sauce with sweetly softened onions, briny capers and a crisp nutty parmesan sesame crust is so genuinely delicious, you won’t miss the heaps of melty cheese common on pizza at all.