Tempero pronto

A raw base for Brazilian cooking

Tempero pronto is a fresh paste of garlic, onion and salt, ground with oil and kept in the refrigerator or freezer so that a cook can start a dish in seconds. It is spoonable and not runny, and it is meant to be used as a base rather than eaten as a sauce. A spoonful goes into a hot pan with oil, where it softens and releases its smell before meat, fish, beans, rice or vegetables go in.

The paste is raw. Nothing in its making is cooked, fermented or cured. Its character comes from garlic and onion broken down in a blender, with the salt drawing moisture and spreading flavour through the mix. Its roles are the ones a sofrito plays in other cuisines: a first layer of flavour for the rest of the dish, prepared in advance so the cook does not peel and chop every time.

Names and relatives

In Brazil the same base is often called refogado, a word the iHeartBrazil recipe gives as the Portuguese equivalent of sofrito. The name tempero pronto means ready seasoning, and it points to the same use: a seasoning that is already made. The paste is closely related to sofrito in Spain and Latin America, and to the sautéed bases of Caribbean cooking, but it is not the same as a fried sofrito, because the Brazilian version is usually kept raw and used in the pan only when the dish needs it.

Tempero pronto should not be confused with tempero baiano, a dry spice blend from Bahia that is made with ground spices and is not a paste. The two names share the word tempero, which means seasoning, but they describe different products.

The ingredients and what they do

Garlic and onion are the core of the paste. Garlic gives the sharp, sulphurous note that softens in the pan, and onion gives sweetness and body. The source formula uses two heads of garlic to two medium onions, which makes a paste that is mostly alliums. The salt does two jobs: it seasons the paste and helps keep it from drying, and it spreads flavour through the cooked dish.

Oil coats the solids and slows drying. The source uses four tablespoons of sunflower oil and notes that olive oil works too. Family versions described in later blog posts add parsley, scallions or other herbs, and some cooks add green peppers or tomato. These are variations of the same base and are not part of the formula the source gives.

A chunky paste and a smooth paste behave differently in the pan. The source prefers a chunky texture, which leaves pieces that brown and give more bite to the finished dish. A smooth paste disperses more evenly through a sauce.

Making it and keeping it

The method is short. The garlic and onion are peeled, the onion is quartered, and everything goes into a food processor or blender with the salt and oil. The mix is pulsed until it reaches the texture the cook wants, then moved into a clean jar or an ice-cube tray. The source gives one cup as the yield of its batch, and a larger family batch of about eight cups is described in a later blog post.

Storage is where the sources disagree. The recipe gives up to 10 days in a jar in the refrigerator and up to 3 months frozen in an ice-cube tray, where a cube can go straight into a hot pan. Other blog pages give one to two weeks, up to 30 days, and up to 3 months. None of these periods is tested, and none is a food-safety limit. The safe reading is the shorter one, and the freezer is the more durable option.

The safety question is the oil. Garlic mixed with oil and kept at room temperature is a recognised botulism risk. This is general food-safety guidance, and the recipe sources do not address it, so a cook should keep the paste chilled or frozen and should not leave it on the counter. Smell, taste and colour are not reliable checks. A paste that has turned green where salt touched the blade is discoloured, not necessarily spoiled, and the cook should still judge it by the storage it has had.

Using it in dishes

The recipe source says the paste is used to sauté vegetables and to marinate meat and fish, and to build the base of stews, soups and sauces. A common rule of thumb in the same source is about one tablespoon of paste for each clove of garlic a recipe calls for. The rule is the author's and is useful as a starting point, not a measured standard.

The source lists dishes in which the paste appears: pasta, chicken pies, farofa, feijoada, galinhada, rice, beans, coxinha, and sautéed cabbage, broccoli or spinach. These are common Brazilian home dishes, and the paste is the first step in each. A cook who makes a feijoada or a galinhada starts with the paste and then adds the meat or the rice.

The paste is not a finished sauce. It is a starting point, and its value is that it saves the cook from chopping garlic and onion for every meal. Its flavour is only as good as the garlic and onion that go into it.

A family version and its limits

A 2002 Washington Post article, as described in later blog posts, told the story of a Brazilian family that made this seasoning in large batches. In that account the family's version was developed by a French-descended family in a town in São Paulo state and later adopted by an Italian-descended family, and it contains onions, garlic, leeks, parsley, basil, scallions and a large amount of salt. This is a press account read through a blog, not the newspaper itself, and it is a single family's recipe.

A family formula is not a standard. The sources do not describe a Brazilian norm for the paste, and the formulas differ in herbs, salt and oil. The page records the family version as one documented household practice and does not treat it as the origin of the paste.

What the sources leave open

No source tests the storage life of the paste, measures its acidity, or gives a food-safety limit for the oil and garlic combination. Storage periods on blog pages are opinion, not validated limits. The paste's history before the modern press accounts is not documented in the sources used here.

A reader who wants a reliable storage method should look for validated guidance on garlic in oil before relying on any duration in this page.