Like Pastan, James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong, doesn’t build his pizza sauce with DOP San Marzanos. For seven years, he has been buying late-harvest tomatoes from Toigo Orchards in Shippensburg, Pa., and canning them at nearby Stello Foods for use at Comet. Last year, Alefantis estimates, he bought 12 tons of Toigo tomatoes, which Stello turned into sauce and canned before trucking the jars to the basement at Buck’s Fishing & Camping, Alefantis’s other restaurant just a few steps down the block on Connecticut Avenue NW.
Alefantis views his choice of tomato not as a dismissal of San Marzanos from Italy but as a reflection of his drive to build a more District-oriented pizza, one that would rely only on regional ingredients. Comet’s lightly cooked sauce is created from a combination of tomatoes, including heirlooms (such as Brandywines), beefsteaks, romas and some Pennsylvania-grown San Marzanos, says farmer Mark Toigo of Toigo Orchards.
Toigo says the Brandywines and beefsteaks help add much-needed moisture to the sauce. Toigo, for one, finds San Marzanos a tad too meaty for sauce. (You can test that theory yourself with Toigo’s San Marzanos, which he will start selling next month — if they’re ripe enough — at the FreshFarm Markets in Dupont Circle and Penn Quarter.)
Alefantis’s efforts to preserve the tomato flavors of the mid-Atlantic year-round carry an inherent risk: The pizzeria might run out of the sauce. “We’ll probably be out in the next few weeks,” Alefantis predicts about the current batch. “So for a few weeks, we’ll be making our own sauces.” Comet will rely on canned San Marzanos for the stopgap sauce, he adds.
Supplies notwithstanding, one of the significant differences between Comet’s pizza sauce and one made with DOP San Marzanos is consistency. Chefs and cooks say that San Marzanos maintain a consistent flavor and texture, year in and year out. Comet’s pizza sauce, because it’s built from tomatoes that vary from year to year, can taste different each season, which is not a problem for Alefantis. He views his sauce as tantamount to wine: It will naturally fluctuate depending on agricultural conditions. Stello will soon be jarring Comet pizza sauce, vintage 2013.
As Toigo notes, heirlooms such as Brandywines carry a lot of moisture, which is largely why cooks prefer to use them in salads and sandwiches rather than in sauces. But as Jeffrey Buben demonstrates to me, heirloom tomatoes may also have the wrong flavor profile for a pasta or pizza sauce. The chef-restaurateur behind Bistro Bis, Vidalia and Woodward Table slices a couple of heirlooms to illustrate his point. Both varieties — Buben isn’t certain what kind they are — have a far fruitier flavor than a typical plum tomato. One tastes almost like a melon. To make a good tomato sauce, Buben emphasizes, you need a fruit whose flavor most diners would identify as “tomato.”
