Short version: 2 parts onion to 1 carrot to 1 celery by weight, sweated in fat, never browned.
Jump to Recipe ↓Mirepoix is not really a recipe. It is the base that sits underneath an enormous number of other recipes: most French soups, nearly every stew, stocks, braises, and the sauces that come off them. Learning it properly is worth more than learning any individual dish it appears in.
The whole thing is a ratio and a technique. Two parts onion to one part carrot to one part celery, by weight rather than by count, cooked gently in fat until soft and sweet but never browned. That is it. Everything else, the cut size, the fat, whether garlic joins in, is adjustable to what you are making.
The part that gets skipped is that cut size is not a matter of taste. It is set by how long the dish is going to cook, and getting it wrong is the reason mirepoix sometimes disappears into a sauce or turns up as identifiable chunks of carrot in a finished consomme.
What Your Board Looks Like
Three vegetables, one ratio, and a cut size chosen to match your cooking time. Weigh them rather than counting: onions and carrots vary enormously in size, and the ratio is the point.
About a cup and a half: onion skins and root plates, carrot peel and tops, celery bases, leaves, and the strings pulled off the ribs. Onion skin is the awkward part, papery and light enough to blow off the board, and carrot peel travels almost as far.
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Mirepoix
The aromatic base under most of French cooking. Make it fresh, or batch it and freeze.
Ingredients
- 400 gyellow onionabout 2 medium, diced
- 200 gcarrotabout 2 medium, peeled and diced
- 200 gceleryabout 4 ribs, strings removed, diced
- 2 tbspbutter or olive oilor a mix of both
- 1 pinchsaltadded at the start, to draw out moisture
Method
- Decide your cut size before you startLong cook over two hours means one inch pieces. Soups and stews mean quarter inch. Quick pan sauces mean an eighth. This single decision determines whether the mirepoix supports the dish or turns up in it as chunks.
- Dice the onionHalve root to tip, peel, make horizontal cuts towards the root without cutting through it, then vertical cuts, then slice across. Keeping the root end intact through the whole process is what stops the onion falling apart on you.
- Peel and dice the carrotPeel, trim, then square the carrot off by cutting a thin slice from one side so it stops rolling. Cut into planks, then sticks, then across. The squaring step takes four seconds and removes most of the danger from cutting a round vegetable.
- String and dice the celeryRun a peeler down the outer curve of the tougher ribs to lift the strings off. Then cut lengthwise into strips and across. Skipping this leaves fibrous threads that never soften, which is celery's main complaint against it.
- Sweat, do not brownMelt the fat over medium-low heat, add all three with a pinch of salt, and cook gently for eight to ten minutes, stirring occasionally. You want them soft, translucent, and sweet, with no color at all. Color means caramelization, which is a different flavor and belongs in a different technique.
- Build the dish on topThe mirepoix is finished when the onion is translucent and the carrot has lost its bite. Everything else in the recipe goes in from here: tomato paste, flour, wine, stock, meat. The base is done and it should taste sweet and mild on its own.
Make It Ahead
This is the single most useful thing to batch prep, because it is the start of so many other meals.
Getting It Right
The ratio is by weight, not by count
Two parts onion, one part carrot, one part celery, measured on a scale. This matters more than it sounds, because a large onion can weigh three times a small one and celery ribs vary wildly. Cooks who make mirepoix by counting vegetables end up with something different every time and cannot work out why the stew tastes different.
Never let it brown
Sweating and sauteing are different operations. Mirepoix is sweated: medium-low heat, a little fat, a pinch of salt to pull moisture out, and no color. Browning it produces caramelized, roasted flavors which are good in their own right but are not what the base of a delicate soup or a white sauce wants. If a recipe wants color, it will say so.
White mirepoix exists for pale dishes
Swap the carrot for parsnip, leek, or mushroom when you are making something that needs to stay pale, like a white stock, a veloute, or a cream soup. The carrot is what tints everything orange, and in a pale dish that reads as a mistake.
Salt at the start, not the end
A pinch of salt going in with the vegetables draws moisture to the surface, which helps them soften without coloring. It is a small thing that makes the sweating step noticeably more reliable, especially if your heat runs a little high.
Upgrade Your Prep Workflow: The ROO Bundle
Mirepoix is the definition of repetitive board work: three vegetables, three different cuts, and a pile of skins, peel, and strings that is bigger than the yield looks like it should produce. If you are batch prepping it, which is the sensible thing to do, you are multiplying all of that by four. The ROO Mat grips the counter so the board stays put while you square off carrots and work through onions, and its built-in 7-cup pouch takes the papery onion skins that otherwise blow across the counter, along with the peel and the celery strings. The Bundle pairs the mat with a 13.75 inch by 9.75 inch rubberwood board and a reusable storage bag.
Upgrade Your Prep Workflow: Get the ROO Bundle
Onion skins and carrot peel into the pouch instead of across the counter.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What do Americans call mirepoix?
Usually just aromatics, or onion, carrot, and celery. The closest named American equivalent is the Cajun and Creole holy trinity, which swaps the carrot for green bell pepper and keeps the onion and celery. It is a genuinely different flavor base, not a translation, and it underpins gumbo, jambalaya, and etouffee.
What is the difference between mirepoix and soffritto?
Mirepoix is French, uses onion, carrot, and celery in a 2:1:1 ratio, and is sweated in butter without color. Italian soffritto uses the same three vegetables but a roughly equal ratio, cooks them in olive oil, and takes them further, often to a light golden color, which gives a deeper, sweeter base. Spanish and Latin American sofrito is different again, built on onion, garlic, peppers, and tomato.
What is Trader Joe's mirepoix?
A refrigerated pack of pre-diced onion, carrot, and celery, sold as a shortcut. It works and it saves fifteen minutes. The trade-offs are that the ratio is fixed at roughly equal parts rather than 2:1:1, the dice size is fixed regardless of what you are cooking, and pre-cut vegetables lose aroma quickly once they are cut.
What is the Mexican version of mirepoix?
Sofrito or recaudo, depending on the region. Both are built on onion and garlic with tomato and chiles rather than carrot and celery, and unlike mirepoix they are often blended into a paste and fried rather than diced and sweated. The purpose is the same: an aromatic base that goes in before anything else.
What size should you cut mirepoix?
It depends entirely on cooking time. One inch pieces for stocks and anything over two hours, since they get strained out. Quarter inch for soups, stews, and braises under two hours, where they stay in the dish. An eighth of an inch for quick pan sauces, where the mirepoix needs to disappear completely into the sauce.
Two parts onion, one carrot, one celery, by weight. Cut to match the cooking time, sweated in fat without color, salted at the start. Make a batch, freeze it flat, and most of your soups and stews start ten minutes ahead.