A can of tomatoes is most of a pizza sauce. The typical sauce in a Naples pizzeria is just puréed canned tomatoes and salt. So the can is worth choosing carefully. This page sorts out what the labels mean and whether the expensive ones earn their price. Specific brands are compared in canned tomatoes for pizza, and the sauce method is in how to make pizza sauce.
What “San Marzano” can mean on a label
The words show up on very different cans:
- San Marzano DOP. A protected name under EU rules (DOP, Denominazione di Origine Protetta, is Italian for Protected Designation of Origin). The full name is Pomodoro San Marzano dell’Agro Sarnese-Nocerino.
- San Marzano with no DOP seal. A San Marzano-type plum tomato, which can be grown anywhere. Ken Forkish notes that you can grow tomatoes from San Marzano seed outside the protected zone and call them San Marzano. They just can’t be DOP.
- “San Marzano style” or “San Marzano type.” A description of shape, with no promise about where the tomato grew.
- “Certified San Marzano.” Cento’s wording. Cento says its tomatoes are grown in the Sarnese Nocerino area and certified by an independent agency to a supply-chain traceability standard. That isn’t the DOP designation, and the cans don’t carry it.
What the DOP actually covers
The DOP designation covers qualifying peeled San Marzano tomatoes, whole or in fillets, grown and processed within the specified Agro Sarnese-Nocerino area. The current production specification, dated 26 August 2019, allows the San Marzano 2 and Kiros varieties and improved lines bred from them within the area. Both the growing and the canning must happen in listed municipalities of the provinces of Salerno, Naples and Avellino, not anywhere in those provinces. A variety name on its own doesn’t establish DOP provenance.
Forkish places the zone in and around the village of San Marzano, between Mount Vesuvius and Naples, not on the volcano’s slopes as is often written. It’s a small crop: he reports that DOP San Marzanos make up about 30,000 tons of the 2.5 million tons of tomatoes harvested in southern Italy each year. To buy the real thing, he says to look for the sunburst DOP logo on the can.
The name is also widely abused. The Campania tomato processor Costantino Cutolo told Forkish that San Marzano “is a huge ground for fraud,” with Naples pizzerias calling tomatoes San Marzano that aren’t. Then Cutolo added the more useful point: “Quality is almost the same; you don’t realize.” Asked how to describe good canned tomatoes from the region that aren’t San Marzano, he said: “Small, pear shaped tomatoes. Whole peeled tomatoes from the south.”
Does DOP make better pizza sauce?
Not necessarily. Forkish wrote “use San Marzano tomatoes” in his first book and now calls that “an oversimplification.” The climate and volcanic soil that make San Marzanos good extend across the region, and his own pizzeria makes its sauce from Italian whole peeled tomatoes that aren’t DOP: a blend of Rega and Ciao brands at the time he wrote. His summary is that DOP San Marzanos “are wonderful, but they are not the only good tomatoes for pizza.”
He also points to tastings by Serious Eats and Cook’s Illustrated that rated North American cans, including Whole Foods’ 365 and Trader Joe’s, above Italian imports, and he names the California brand Bianco DiNapoli as one he likes.
So DOP is a reliable way to get a good Italian tomato, not the only way. What you can taste is ripeness:
- Brix. This measures dissolved sugars and solids. Forkish reports that tomatoes average about 4.5 Brix at harvest, that the industry targets about 6 in the can, and that one Campania processor aims for about 7. Lower Brix makes a thinner, less sweet sauce.
- Taste it raw. Open the can and eat a tomato. If it’s flat, watery or sharply acidic, it will taste that way on the pizza.
Whole peeled vs. crushed
Whole peeled cans get the best fruit. Forkish notes that processors reserve their highest-quality tomatoes for canning whole; the others go into juice and other products such as paste.
Crushed tomatoes are often thickened. Under US rules, canned tomatoes can be packed in tomato juice or in puree or paste, and many crushed tomatoes list puree on the label. That makes a thicker sauce, and you can’t tell how much is fruit and how much is puree.
Diced tomatoes resist breaking down. US rules let canners add calcium salts as firming agents, with a higher limit for diced and sliced tomatoes than for whole. That firmness is the point of diced tomatoes. In a pizza sauce you blend or crush by hand, you want tomatoes that soften easily, so check the label for calcium chloride.
When crushed is fine. For a thick sauce on a pan pizza or a tomato pie, a good crushed tomato saves a step. For a Neapolitan-style or New York sauce, start from whole peeled and do the crushing yourself: a few pulses in a blender, a food mill or your hands. That lets you control the texture, and you aren’t paying for puree.
The packing liquid
Many recipes tell you to drain canned tomatoes. Forkish did too, until the importer Fred Mortati explained that the juice is cooked down early in production, so it carries more tomato solids than the whole fruit. Forkish now uses the whole can and gets a thick sauce by not overblending: long blending releases water from the tomato flesh.
Sources
- Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016), chapter 4, “Tomatoes” and “Tomato Sauce”: the DOP sidebar, Costantino Cutolo on fraud, quality and Brix, the 30,000-ton figure, Fred Mortati on packing juice, the Serious Eats and Cook’s Illustrated tastings, Bianco DiNapoli, and the Rega and Ciao blend. Chapter 2: Neapolitan sauce as puréed tomatoes and salt.
- Italian Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies, production specification for Pomodoro San Marzano dell’Agro Sarnese-Nocerino DOP (26 August 2019), articles 2, 3, 4 and 6, as published by the DOP consortium. Checked October 14, 2026.
- US Code of Federal Regulations, 21 CFR 155.190, canned tomatoes: packing media and calcium salts as firming agents.
- Cento Fine Foods: FAQ (Agri-Cert certification under UNI EN ISO 22005:2008). Checked October 14, 2026.