Short version: rough chop everything, blend to a coarse paste, freeze in an ice cube tray.
Jump to Recipe ↓Sofrito causes confusion because two different things share the name. Italian soffritto is onion, carrot, and celery cooked slowly in fat at the start of a dish, the same idea as a French mirepoix. Puerto Rican sofrito is a raw green paste of peppers, herbs, garlic, and onion, blended and stored, then spooned into a pan later.
This is the Puerto Rican one, and it is a genuinely useful thing to have in a freezer. Two cubes into hot oil is the starting point for rice and beans, stews, braises, and beans, and it does in thirty seconds what would otherwise be ten minutes of chopping every single time you cook.
The one ingredient worth hunting for is culantro, sometimes labelled recao. It is a long serrated leaf that tastes like a much stronger, deeper cilantro, and it is what makes Puerto Rican sofrito taste specifically like itself. Cilantro alone works and it is a slightly different thing.
What Your Board Looks Like
Everything gets blended, so the cutting here is rough by design. What the board is for is breaking things down enough that the blender can work evenly rather than leaving big chunks spinning above the blade.
Around two cups: pepper cores and seed clusters, onion skin and root ends, a full head of garlic skins, herb stems that are too thick to blend. The garlic skins are the notable part. A whole head produces a surprising drift of papery skin that is light enough to move on a draught and sticks to damp hands, and it is the classic example of scrap that ends up everywhere except the bin.
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Sofrito
No cooking at all, twenty-five minutes once, and it lasts three months in the freezer. Makes about 3 cups.
Ingredients
- 4aji dulce peppersor 1 green bell pepper, roughly chopped
- 1red bell pepperroughly chopped, optional
- 1 largeonionroughly cut into eighths
- 1 whole headgarliccloves peeled
- 1 large bunchculantro (recao)or 2 bunches cilantro
- 1 bunchcilantrostems included
- 2 tbspfresh oreganoleaves only
- 2 tbspolive oil
- 1 tspfine salt
Method
- Prep the garlic efficientlyBreak the head apart, lay each clove flat, and press down on it with the side of a wide knife. The skin splits and comes away in one piece. Doing a whole head this way takes about two minutes instead of ten.
- Rough chop everything elsePeppers deseeded and cut into inch pieces, onion into eighths, herbs roughly chopped stems and all. Precision is irrelevant here, but consistency of size helps the blender work evenly.
- Blend in stagesStart with the peppers and onion, which have the most water and will create the liquid the rest needs to move. Once they are broken down, add the garlic, herbs, oil, and salt. Adding the herbs to a dry blender jar leaves them stuck to the sides.
- Stop while it is still coarseSofrito should have visible texture, not be a smooth puree. Pulse rather than run it, and stop when it looks like a coarse, wet paste. Over-blending makes it foamy and pale.
- Portion and freezeSpoon it into an ice cube tray and freeze solid, then pop the cubes into a bag. Each cube is roughly two tablespoons, which is one portion for a pot of rice or beans. This is the whole reason for making a large batch.
Make It Ahead
Sofrito exists to be made ahead. There is very little point making a small batch, because the effort is in the prep and it is the same for three cups as for one.
Getting It Right
This is a raw base, not a cooked one
Puerto Rican sofrito is blended raw and stored, then cooked when it is used. This is the key difference from Italian soffritto and Spanish sofrito, both of which are cooked as they are made. If a recipe tells you to fry it for twenty minutes as you make it, that is a different dish with the same name.
Find culantro if you can
Also sold as recao or long coriander, it is a long serrated leaf with a much deeper, more pungent flavor than cilantro. It is what gives Puerto Rican sofrito its distinctive taste and it is worth a trip to a Latin or Asian grocer. Use both culantro and cilantro rather than choosing.
Keep it coarse
A good sofrito has visible flecks and texture. Blended to a smooth puree it goes pale, foamy, and loses the character that makes it worth having. Pulse it, look at it, and stop earlier than you think.
Crush the garlic to peel it
A whole head is thirty or forty cloves and peeling them individually is a genuinely tedious job. Pressing each clove flat under the side of a knife splits the skin and it comes away whole. Two minutes for the head.
Freeze it in cubes, not in a block
A frozen block of sofrito means thawing the whole thing every time you want two tablespoons. Ice cube trays give you exactly portioned amounts that go straight from freezer to pan, which is the difference between using it constantly and forgetting it is there.
Upgrade Your Prep Workflow: The ROO Bundle
Sofrito is a high-volume prep with an unusually large amount of waste for what you end up with: a full head of garlic, a bunch of peppers, an onion, and three bunches of herbs, producing about two cups of skins, cores, and stems for three cups of finished paste. Crushing forty garlic cloves under the flat of a knife also means forty firm downward strikes on the board, which is exactly the motion that walks an unsecured board across a counter. The ROO Mat absorbs that, and the pouch catches the drift of garlic skin that would otherwise end up across the whole worktop.
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A board that takes forty garlic crushes, and a pouch that catches the skins.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What are the ingredients for sofrito?
Puerto Rican sofrito is peppers, onion, garlic, culantro, cilantro, and oregano, blended raw with a little oil and salt. Spanish sofrito is a cooked base of onion, garlic, tomato, and olive oil, and Italian soffritto is onion, carrot, and celery cooked in fat. The name covers three different preparations.
What are the ingredients in authentic Puerto Rican sofrito?
Aji dulce peppers, cubanelle or green bell pepper, onion, a full head of garlic, culantro or recao, cilantro, and oregano brujo. Culantro is the ingredient that most defines the flavor, and it is a different plant from cilantro despite the similar name and taste.
What is Puerto Rican sofrito used for?
It is the starting base for a large part of the cuisine. Two tablespoons into hot oil begins arroz con gandules, habichuelas guisadas, pernil marinades, stews, soups, and braises. It is made in bulk and frozen precisely because it is used constantly rather than for one dish.
How to make a soffritto?
Italian soffritto is different from Puerto Rican sofrito. Dice onion, carrot, and celery to a uniform quarter inch, roughly two parts onion to one each of carrot and celery, and cook them slowly in olive oil for ten to twelve minutes until soft and sweet. It is cooked as part of a dish rather than made ahead and stored.
How long does sofrito last?
Three months frozen in ice cube trays, which is how it is intended to be stored. In the fridge in a sealed jar with a film of oil on top it holds about a week, though the bright green color darkens after the first few days.
Rough chop, blend coarse, and freeze it in cubes. Twenty-five minutes once gives you three months of a base that turns rice, beans, and stews into something that tastes like it took much longer than it did.