Kitchen Secrets with Our Cuban Chef – Sofrito Cubano

Sofrito is not a dish. It is the first fifteen minutes of almost every Cuban dish, and it decides how the rest of the pot tastes. Onion, green pepper and garlic cooked slowly in olive oil until they collapse, then seasoned with cumin and oregano and darkened with tomato. The beans, the picadillo, the stewed meat, the rice that comes out yellow and smells of the whole kitchen – all of it is built on top of this.

Most people who say their Cuban food tastes flat are making the same mistake. They rush this step. Fifteen minutes in a pan feels long when you are hungry, but nothing later in the recipe can replace what happens in those minutes. Onion cooked for four minutes still tastes like raw onion. Onion cooked for fifteen tastes sweet, and that sweetness is what carries garlic, cumin and pork fat through everything else.

This is our working recipe. It makes about two and a half cups, which at a quarter cup per pot is ten dishes, and it freezes well. Make it once on a Sunday and you have taken the longest step out of every Cuban dish you cook that week.

From a Spanish pan to a Cuban one

The word comes from sofreir, Spanish for to fry lightly – to cook something below the temperature that browns it. The technique is old in Spain and it changes from region to region. In Catalonia a sofregit can be little more than onion cooked down for a very long time with tomato and olive oil, stirred until it turns dark and thick enough to hold the mark of the spoon. That patience is the part that travelled.

Peppers and tomatoes are American plants. They crossed to Europe after 1492, worked their way into Spanish cooking over the following centuries, and then came back to the Caribbean inside a Spanish method. Cumin had reached Spanish kitchens from further east long before any of that, and oregano was already growing wild around the Mediterranean. So what happens in the pan is a Spanish technique, carrying Old World seasoning, applied to New World vegetables.

What made it Cuban was what grew on the island and what was in the cupboard. Green bell pepper in real quantity, not as a background note. Garlic by the head rather than the clove. Cumin used with a heavier hand than most cooks in Spain would use it. Lard in country kitchens, olive oil where it could be had, and a splash of dry wine at the end because there was usually a bottle of vino seco open for cooking.

Cuban, Puerto Rican and Spanish sofrito are not the same thing

Puerto Rican sofrito is often not fried at all at the moment it is made. It is a raw blend – culantro, cilantro, aji dulce, onion, garlic, sometimes green pepper – pulsed in a blender, packed into jars or frozen in cubes, and spooned into the pot to cook there. It is bright green, herb-forward, and cumin is usually not part of it. Made green with no tomato, it is often called recaito. The Dominican version works on the same principle.

Spanish sofrito sits at the other end: onion and tomato, garlic, olive oil, cooked down slowly, and generally no cumin. Cuban sofrito falls between the two. It is cooked in the pan like the Spanish one, it leans hard on green pepper and garlic like the Caribbean ones, and it takes its aroma from dried spices rather than fresh herbs. Cuban cooking uses very little fresh coriander, and once you notice that, the difference between a Cuban pot and a Puerto Rican one is easy to taste.

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup Spanish olive oil
• 1 large yellow onion, cut into 1/8-inch dice (about 2 cups)
• 1 large green bell pepper, seeded and cut into 1/8-inch dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
• 8 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup dry white wine, or vino seco (which is salted – hold back on the salt if you use it)
• 1 cup tomato sauce (one 8 oz can)

How to make Cuban sofrito

1. Dice the onion and the green pepper as small as you can hold a knife steady for, around 1/8 inch. Uneven pieces cook unevenly, and any piece that survives the pan whole will still taste raw an hour later in the stew. Set the two vegetables together in one bowl and the minced garlic in a separate one, because the garlic goes in much later.
2. Pour the olive oil into a wide heavy skillet or a shallow pot and set it over medium-low heat for about 2 minutes, until the surface loosens and moves easily when you tilt the pan. Do not let it smoke. Sofrito is fried below browning temperature from start to finish.
3. Add the onion and green pepper with the teaspoon of salt and cook for 12 to 15 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. The pieces should go from opaque to translucent and soft enough to crush against the side of the pan with a spoon. If you see any golden colour on the onion, drop the heat. Salt early here, because it pulls water out and helps the vegetables collapse instead of frying.
4. Stir in the garlic and cook it for 2 minutes only. You are waiting for the sharp raw smell to turn round and sweet. Garlic burns in seconds at this stage and burnt garlic will run through everything you build on top of this base.
5. Crush the dried oregano between your palms over the pan to wake it up, then add it with the cumin and the bay leaves. Stir constantly for 45 to 60 seconds until the cumin smells toasted and slightly nutty. Ground spices need contact with hot fat to give anything up, and this short step is the difference between seasoned sofrito and dusty sofrito.
6. Pour in the wine and scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon to lift everything stuck there. Let it bubble for about 2 minutes, until the raw alcohol smell is gone and the pan is nearly dry again.
7. Add the tomato sauce and the black pepper, lower the heat so the surface barely moves, and simmer uncovered for 12 to 15 minutes. The colour will deepen from bright red to brick, the mixture will pull away from the sides when you drag a spoon through it, and a thin ring of orange oil will separate at the edge. That ring of oil is the signal that it is finished.
8. Taste and correct the salt, then take the pan off the heat. Use it straight away as the base of a dish, or cool it completely, lift out the bay leaves and store it. It keeps 5 days in a sealed jar in the refrigerator, or up to 3 months frozen in ice cube trays at roughly 2 tablespoons per cube.

Chef’s notes

• Too much heat is the usual failure. If the onion goes brown at the edges you have made a different thing – the flavour turns toasted and slightly bitter, and it sits on top of the dish instead of underneath it. Medium-low the whole way, and if the pan starts to hiss loudly, pull it off the burner for a minute.
• Do not cut the oil. A third of a cup looks like a lot for two vegetables. It is the fat that carries the cumin and garlic into whatever you cook next, and most of it stays in the pot rather than on the plate. A low-fat sofrito tastes thin no matter how long you cook it.
• Green pepper only. Red and yellow peppers are sweeter and they push the colour orange. The slight grassy edge of green pepper is part of what makes Cuban food taste the way it does, and it is one of the few places where the cheaper vegetable is the correct one.
• Watch the tomato. Tomato sauce and tomato paste are not interchangeable here. Paste is roughly three times as concentrated, so if that is all you have, use a third of a cup and top it up with water to make a cup, then simmer a few minutes longer to lose the tinned taste.

What to build on it

A quarter cup of sofrito is the starting point for a pot of black beans: stir it into the beans in the last half hour of cooking with a bay leaf and a spoonful of vinegar, and the pot goes from soupy to seasoned. The same quarter cup carries picadillo, ropa vieja, chicken fricassee and any bean or lentil you want to make taste Cuban. For rice, brown the meat first, add the sofrito, then the rice, then the liquid – that order is what gives a dish like arroz con carne its colour all the way through the grain rather than only on the surface.

It also works in smaller amounts where you would not expect it. A spoonful in the filling for empanadas or stuffed potatoes. A spoonful stirred through scrambled eggs with a little ham. A spoonful in the pan before you add water for a simple soup. The frozen cubes are there so you can use two tablespoons on a Tuesday without making a production of it.

Come and taste what it does

Everything we cook here starts in a pan like this one, early in the morning, before the doors open. If you want to taste what fifteen patient minutes does to a pot of beans or a tray of stewed meat before you commit an afternoon to making your own, look through the full menu and order for pickup, or call us at (813) 450-2176. We are at 5555 S 78th St in Tampa, and on weekdays we open at five in the morning.