Puerto Rican sofrito (recaíto)

A raw base for the start of a dish

Sofrito is the aromatic base of Spanish-speaking Caribbean cooking: onion, garlic, peppers and herbs chopped or blended together and cooked gently in fat. In Puerto Rico the base is usually called sofrito or recaíto, and the paste is made raw and stored, to be cooked later when a dish needs it. That is the first thing to understand about it: the Puerto Rican paste is a preparation kept in the refrigerator, not a pan step done each time.

Cooks put the paste into beans, rice, stews and fish and meat dishes. It gives the start of a dish its green, herbal, pepper-sweet character.

Culantro and ají dulce

Wikipedia describes Puerto Rican sofrito as defined by its heavy use of recao, the culantro (Eryngium foetidum), and by ají dulce. Culantro is a long, serrated-leaved herb with a strong, pungent smell that is not the same plant as cilantro, though the two are often used side by side. The paste also carries cilantro, sometimes with its roots.

Ají dulce is a sweet perennial pepper in the species Capsicum chinense, closely related to the habanero but much milder, with a smoky flavour and a heat rating of 0 to 500 Scoville units. It is known as ají cachucha, quechucha, ajicito and ají gustoso, and as seasoning pepper in English-speaking Caribbean islands. Puerto Rico grows it commercially. Where it is hard to find, recipe sites often use cubanelle pepper instead, which the Puerto Rican blend lists anyway.

Recaíto and sofrito

The names overlap. Some Puerto Rican sources say recaíto takes its name from recao, the culantro, and describe a culantro-based sauce made with onions and garlic. Others treat recaíto and sofrito as the same thing on the island. The article on sofrito does not settle which name belongs to which preparation, so the two should be read as local usage rather than separate dishes.

Tomato is the point most often confused. The Puerto Rican paste does not contain it. Tomato appears only as an optional addition when the paste is cooked in a pan, and the Puerto Rican recipes read for this page rarely use it at all.

The same name across the Caribbean

The Dominican version, called sazón, has no standard recipe. Its defining elements are false oregano (Lippia micromera), garlic, red onions and cubanelle peppers, with annatto, tomato, celery, vinegar, citrus, culantro, ají dulce or cilantro added by household or region.

The Cuban base is Spanish onion, garlic and green or red bell pepper, with ají cachucha sometimes used in place of or beside the bell pepper. It underlies beans, stews, rice, ropa vieja and picadillo, and tomato sauce, wine, cumin, bay and cilantro are optional. Each island's paste is a regional answer to the same idea, and none of them should be swapped into another's recipe without noting the difference.

Where the name comes from

Sofrito derives from sofreír, to stir-fry lightly, and the earliest recorded recipe the Wikipedia article gives is a Catalan one from the mid-14th century, of onion cooked in oil. That is a documented starting point for the family of dishes, not a history of the Puerto Rican paste. Claims that the Puerto Rican version came from Spain, or that the Taíno added culantro and sweet peppers, are not documented in the sources read and are not stated here.