There must be as many recipes for sofrito as there are cooks in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and even Catalunya. But the mixture is to Latin cooking what the classic mirepoix of onions, carrots and celery is to French. It’s the underlying mother flavor of the cuisines.

When I asked around the garden, I got very different answers about ingredients. Jamaicans seemed to favor a lot of green sweet pepper, and some suggested ham. Some people add tomato, some don’t. But everyone felt that the sweet ají dulce peppers were critical for an authentic sofrito. If they were not available, you could substitute an equal amount of chopped bell pepper. Some folks use only cilantro (or cilantrillo, as some call it), while others insist on also using culantro, the Caribbean herb with flat leaves about the size and shape of a finger. The flavor is similar to cilantro, but is much more intense.

Back in the kitchen, I made a sofrito that used the ingredients that seemed to cut across the various cuisines, though I confess I was probably more influenced by Puerto Rican sofrito than any other version. When I tasted the sauce that came out of the food processor, I was initially disappointed. It was harsh and the flavors did not marry.

But then I tried cooking with it. Seasoned with just a bit of salt and some sugar (the tomatoes were not that sweet), the mixture came together into a sauce of complex, layered flavors when heated. After all, I told myself, you wouldn’t eat raw mirepoix either, right?

Seasoned and lightly sauteed, this sofrito makes a terrific sauce for chicken or fish. It’s shown here on a small swordfish steak brushed with olive oil and cooked by indirect heat for five minutes total in a Weber charcoal grill.

Following the directions of Daisy Martinez of the Daisy Cooks! show on PBS, I froze the rest of the raw sofrito in half-cup batches to use in soups and stews this fall.

BASIC SOFRITO

In the best of all worlds, I would have added culantro, but I did not grow any this year and I could not find it at local ethnic markets. Hence, this recipe has a lot of cilantro.

Ingredients

1 medium yellow onion cut in large pieces
1 very large or two medium cubanelle peppers, seeded and chopped
10 cloves garlic, peeled
1 large bunch cilantro, washed
10 Cayman peppers, stemmed and roughly chopped
3 large plum-type tomatoes, cored and cut into chunks
1 large red bell pepper, cored, seeded and chopped

Directions

Place onion and pepper pieces in bowl of food processor and process until roughly chopped. Add remaining ingredients, one by one, and process until smooth but not paste-like.