Sofrito Puertorriqueño

the green aromatic paste that begins nearly every Puerto Rican dish: sweet ají dulce and cubanelle peppers blitzed with onion, garlic, and long-leaved culantro

Origin: Puerto Rico

From the journey of Bell Pepper.

Sofrito in Puerto Rico, often called recaíto when it is at its greenest, is not a dish but the foundation of a cuisine. It is a fragrant green paste of sweet peppers, onion, garlic, and herbs, blitzed raw and kept in the refrigerator or frozen in ice-cube trays, and a spoonful of it fried in oil or in annatto-tinted lard is the first step of almost every rice dish, bean pot, stew, and braise on the island. Its irreplaceable ingredient is the ají dulce, a small, squat, wrinkled sweet pepper that is not a bell pepper at all but a non-pungent form of Capsicum chinense, the Amazonian species of the habanero; it carries the whole floral, apricot-scented perfume of that species with none of its heat, and nothing else tastes quite like it. Beside it go cubanelle or Italian frying peppers for body, and culantro (recao), the long-leaved herb whose flavour is coriander intensified several times over. Every household holds that its own proportions are correct, recipes descend through families, and a Puerto Rican kitchen without a tub of sofrito in it is scarcely functioning. It is the clearest demonstration that the sweet pepper, in the Caribbean, is not a vegetable served beside a meal but the flavour base from which the meal is built.

Ingredients

  • 15 whole ají dulce (sweet seasoning peppers), stemmed
  • 2 whole cubanelle or green Italian frying peppers, deseeded and chopped
  • 1 whole green bell pepper, deseeded and chopped
  • 2 whole onions, quartered
  • 1 whole head of garlic, cloves peeled
  • 1 large bunch culantro (recao) leaves
  • 1 small bunch coriander, leaves and stems
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp dried oregano

Method

  1. Wash and stem the ají dulce. Leave the seeds in or remove them as you prefer, since they carry no heat in this pepper.
  2. Put all the peppers, the onion, and the garlic into a food processor and pulse until roughly chopped.
  3. Add the culantro, coriander, oregano, and olive oil and pulse again just until you have a coarse green paste flecked with pepper.
  4. Transfer to a clean jar for the refrigerator, or spoon into ice-cube trays and freeze, transferring the frozen cubes to a bag.
  5. To use, fry two or three tablespoons in oil, or in oil coloured with annatto, over a medium heat for a few minutes until fragrant and the raw edge is gone, then build the dish on top of it.

Notes

Ají dulce are sold fresh in Caribbean and Latin American markets and frozen elsewhere; there is no true substitute, though a mixture of extra cubanelle with a single deseeded habanero rubbed round the bowl approximates the aroma. Proportions vary by family, and many cooks add a tomato, a little green olive, or a stalk of celery. This green version, sometimes called recaíto, is the Puerto Rican standard; Dominican and Cuban sofritos lean more on tomato and oregano, and the Spanish sofrito, from which all of them descend, is a cooked tomato-and-garlic base rather than a raw green paste.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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