Sofrito is the base condiment of many food preparations in Puerto Rico. It is used as the base and main condiment to make soups, stews, rices and ground meat recipes among many others.
Its preparation may slightly differ from person to person and there is not such a thing as a specific recipe. The most common ingredients used in the island are onions, ají peppers, sweet green peppers, garlic, cilantro and culantro. Ají peppers are a small and common type of sweet peppers widely used in the island. Culantro is an interesting ingredient since it commonly goes by two different names at the island. It can be called culantro or recao; some people call cilantro by the name of thin leaf reacao (“recao de hoja fina”) and culantro by the name of wide leaf recao or long leaf recao (“recao de hoja ancha”, ”recao de hoja larga”). Both, cilantro and culantro are key ingredients of a good sofrito in Puerto Rico, therefore the video I have shared offers an option for those of us who live in places where some of these ingredient may be difficult or impossible to get.
That said, the omission of recao and ajíes don’t really jeopardize obtaining a good sofrito. For the most part I never have access to both of these ingredients and I am always very pleased with the sofrito I make at home. Sofrito is better made using a food processor since it renders less liquid in the final product but if you are like me and don’t have one then an important factor when using a blender is speed and time. Remember this is not a shake or smoothie, you want to have some texture, therefore make sure not to pulverize the ingredients. Certainly there are different preferences as to how chunky the final product is, but it should always have some texture and the less liquid the better.
As I mentioned at the beginning the preparation may slightly differ from person to person and that’s noticeable in their sofritos. This is because not only there may be variances in the ingredients used but also on the quantities used. Some sofritos are of a deep and dark green color which means lots of recao and cilantro were implemented on the preparation in contrast with the other ingredients. Some people, like myself, may use peppers of different colors and some others may only use green, some people may add oil, some others won’t and so on.
The point I want to make is that there is no definite way of making sofrito but the ingredients I mentioned on the second paragraph are certainly the most commonly used. Nonetheless even the simplest sofrito will highlight any food preparation, that’s for sure.
Lastly, sofrito can be frozen to be used at a later time and more conveniently it can be portion frozen so that you can take it out as needed to add in your food preparation the same way you would take pieces of ice to add and chill drinks. Silicone molds are excellent to create small pellets of sofrito that resemble pieces of ice and that are easily used to add into the food by small quantities until achieving the desired amount.
