Pizza Sauce vs. Marinara Sauce (Most Important Differences)

Choosing Between Pizza Sauce vs. Marinara

You have a seemingly-endless number of tomato-based options in front of you, but no idea which to choose for the night— sound familiar? If you’re choosing between pizza sauce vs marinara sauce, then you’ve come to the right place. This is a succinct guide to the differences between the two, and how to choose which to use.

We all know that both pizza sauce and marinara are made from tomatoes, but that’s about where the similarities run out. The main difference between pizza sauce and marinara is in the levels of spice and the consistency of the sauces. Both can taste great on a pizza, but it just depends on the flavor you’re seeking.

For tomato lovers choosing between pizza sauce vs marinara sauce, the applications of each may seem endless. Can you substitute pizza sauce for marinara sauce? How about vice versa? Can you use marinara or pizza sauce on pasta? What about in recipes? In this article I’ll give you the lowdown on both sauces, as well as which to use in any situation.

What Is Pizza Sauce?

Pizza sauce is a creation originally designed to make the most flavorful pizza possible. It’s a simple and relatively thick sauce compared to marinara, as it’s also meant to be able to hold on to cheese and any other toppings you may want to put on your pizza. Like marinara it contains spices, almost always oregano and basil, as well as salt and crushed tomatoes. It’s cooked with all the ingredients together until it thickens up, and some sort of tomato paste is often added to strengthen the tomato flavor.

For example, a very popular brand, Rao’s Homemade’s Pizza Sauce contains: Italian Whole-Peeled Tomatoes, Italian Cherry Tomatoes, Olive Oil, Carrots, Onions, Salt, Oregano, Garlic, Basil.

The addition of cherry tomatoes and carrots here are to sweeten the sauce in a way that seems to appeal to Americans, while the garlic makes it even more savory. However, pizza sauce is different from tomato sauce used on pasta in part because of how much less sweet it is, and adding sugar to pizza sauce would be a travesty to most Italians. The key difference in pizza sauce vs. marinara is the emphasis upon a sweeter tomato-based sauce (pizza sauce) or a more savory tomato-based sauce (marinara sauce).

What Is Marinara Sauce?

Marinara is a much more diversely-applicable sauce than pizza sauce. If you’re not sure what you’ll use it for, but you want to keep some tomato-based sauce in the pantry and they’re all on sale, opt for the marinara. Not only does it notoriously take longer to make, as all the ingredients are supposed to be slow-roasted, but it’s got a much more basic flavor profile.

To compare to the their pizza sauce, Rao’s Homemade’s Marinara Sauce contains: Italian Whole Peeled Tomatoes, Olive Oil, Onions, Salt, Garlic, Basil, Black Pepper, Oregano.

At first glance this may look incredibly similar to the pizza sauce— because it is. But if you look more closely, you’ll notice that their marinara doesn’t contain cherry tomatoes nor carrots, like the pizza sauce does. This results in a lighter and somewhat less sweet sauce, and the sprinkle of black pepper and oregano on there are nothing compared to the punch of oregano flavor you’d get from a pizza sauce.

Yet the marinara is often thought of as more savory, and this is due to the addition of allium. Both modern marinaras and pizza sauces usually contain garlic, at least in the US, but marinara features the onion in a different way. Onions for a marinara sauce are roasted slowly, browning them until they’re sticky sweet & savory, and then blending them into whole crushed tomatoes before lightly cooking the mixture.

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