Everyone here is trying to be way too literal to "gotcha" about what sauce is.
I am Italian, and you need to define these things way more off feel and appearance than some scientific definition of "sauce" that you just made up.
Regardless of whether "pizza sauce" is cooked or not, you look at and you know it's sauce. It's near-puree consistency, with all the ingredients having been blended together, you could spread it easily with a spoon.
Look at that picture, those are clearly crushed tomatoes that were very recently a full tomato, not like a canned "crushed tomato" you would get in a store that's already like 95% of the way to sauce consistency.
You could not spread those around evenly or easily with a spoon. It's not a sauce. It's crushed tomatoes, with salt, oregano, and olive oil.
If you want to "gotcha" go with the fact that the vast majority of these would not be called "pizzas" by anyone in Italy - as mentioned by
@elrond89.
Again by feel - you look at a big piece of woven/folded bread with some other ingredients - does it feel like pizza to you? Probably not. Most of those would be called "focaccias" or similar.
Looks similar to a standard, default-toppings New Haven style pizza, to me, which also features a coarse-crushed-tomato sauce and not much else. In either case I think you point at one and tell the average person on the street—especially among an English-speaking audience, as I suppose this article is aimed at—"look, this pizza has no sauce" and they'll look at you funny and think you're playing some kind of joke on them, because it sure looks like it only has sauce. Listing the ingredients the way the article does just makes that seem to be even more true, since it's practically a recipe for pizza sauce.
For the second time on this thread, its because it’s not blended up into sauce! The ingredients are placed on separately and the consistency is not that of sauce! Any more than a bag of sugar next to a carton of eggs is a cake batter!
> practically a recipe for pizza sauce
You're saying it yourself but not absorbing it. The ingredients themselves do not make a final product, in the same way that a fajita plate is not a burrito which is not a quesadilla.
I'm looking at the picture, and that sure looks like a valid sauce consistency to me. A coarse sauce, but a sauce. Again, it looks like (I mean, exactly like) what's on other sauce-mostly pizzas that people definitely say have sauce on them. shrug
Also: so you're telling me they put the crushed tomato on, then put salt and oregano on top of it, rather than stirring those into the crushed tomato? I guess if the oregano is fresh and goes on after the bake, but I'm not seeing that in the photo. One way or another, it's settling in to the sauce.
Pizza sauce, being (in its minimum form) so very simple and uncooked, is a weird case. The ingredients themselves do make the final product, for that. I'd still call that a pizza sauce, and again, I think you'd get a lot of weird looks showing that photo to people and telling them it lacks sauce. If it's not sauce, then lots of more-normal pizzas "don't have sauce" either. Like, if you just had salted crushed tomato, not even any oregano, on a pizza, I would absolutely say it's got pizza sauce on it. Oregano's common, but not required. It'll taste weird enough without any salt that I might start to reconsider then, but only then.
I am Italian, and you need to define these things way more off feel and appearance than some scientific definition of "sauce" that you just made up.
Regardless of whether "pizza sauce" is cooked or not, you look at and you know it's sauce. It's near-puree consistency, with all the ingredients having been blended together, you could spread it easily with a spoon.
Look at that picture, those are clearly crushed tomatoes that were very recently a full tomato, not like a canned "crushed tomato" you would get in a store that's already like 95% of the way to sauce consistency. You could not spread those around evenly or easily with a spoon. It's not a sauce. It's crushed tomatoes, with salt, oregano, and olive oil.
If you want to "gotcha" go with the fact that the vast majority of these would not be called "pizzas" by anyone in Italy - as mentioned by @elrond89. Again by feel - you look at a big piece of woven/folded bread with some other ingredients - does it feel like pizza to you? Probably not. Most of those would be called "focaccias" or similar.