Puerto Rican · Sauce
Sofrito
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, a briny, maritime salinity, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 500 g yellow onions, peeled and quartered
- 200 g cubanelle peppers, seeded
- 180 g red bell pepper, seeded
- 150 g ajíes dulces (cachucha peppers), stems pulled off
- 90 g garlic cloves, peeled, about 2 heads
- 40 g recao leaves (culantro), about 20 leaves
- 60 g cilantro, leaves and stems
- 60 ml olive oil
Equipment
Food processor · Sheet pan
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splits
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Pull the stems off the ajíes dulces. They are a sweet pepper, so there is nothing to deseed for heat.
- Put the garlic, the ajíes and half the onion in a processor first and pulse until coarsely chopped, stopping well short of liquid.
- Add the remaining onion, both peppers, the recao and the cilantro with its stems, and pulse in short bursts to a wet relish; you should still see separate flecks of green and white.
- Pulse in the olive oil, which coats the cut surfaces and holds off browning.
- Freeze in an ice cube tray, then bag the cubes. Two cubes is about 60 g, enough for one pot of rice.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes
- It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
- The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
- The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
- The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
- Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.
Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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