Dominican Sofrito: the base of almost every dish in this kitchen
Sofrito is not a garnish and it is not optional. It is the first thing that goes in the pan, and almost every Dominican dish in this kitchen starts there. What follows is how it is made here: blended, never chopped, and always kept in reserve before any protein touches the heat.
Victor Matos September 6, 2026
Ingredients
- 1 whole sweet red bell pepper
- 1 full head of garlic
- 1 sprig of curly parsley, not flat leaf. The flavor changes.
- 1 tablespoon of salt
- 1/4 cup of olive oil
Method
Blend everything together until smooth. The olive oil goes in the blender too.
Keep it in reserve. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters.
Use it to sear the protein or the main vegetable at the start of cooking, never as a finishing sauce.
Two things worth knowing
This sofrito already carries salt, so any recipe using it needs little extra salt, or none at all. And it always goes into the pan with olive oil, in every recipe, except for anything deep fried.
The full history of the six seasonings behind it, one by one, is here: the six seasonings in Dominican sofrito and where they really come from.
Where sofrito comes from
Sofrito was not born in the Caribbean. It began as sofregit in medieval Catalan cooking, and it was first written down in the Llibre de Sent Soví, from 1324, the oldest surviving culinary text in Catalan. That original sofregit had no tomato, because the tomato had not yet crossed the Atlantic: it was onion or leek and a fat, oil or lard, and nothing else.
That base reached the island with colonization and changed shape here. The sofrito of this kitchen is blended rather than chopped, trades the onion for sweet pepper, garlic and curly parsley, and is set aside before any protein touches the heat. It is the same underlying idea seven centuries later, with different ingredients: build the flavor before you start cooking.