There are many recipes of Soffritto, but most fail miserably. Not many have understood the true essence of Soffritto. If you follow those recipes, your food will taste bland, and be only half as tasty as it can get.

In this post I reveal the secret to do a correct Soffritto. Once you try this recipe, you will never cook Soffritto or Ragu Bolognese the same old way again. I promise you that. Here is a post of a vegan recipe of Bolognese, which tastes better than meat Bolognese. All meat eaters who try my Bolognese are always very surprised when I tell them the Bolognese is vegan, because my Bolognese is the best they ever had – everybody says.

The secret of a superior vegan Bolognese, starts with a correct Soffritto. So read this post well.

Soffritto is the base for many Italian dishes, for instance, the famous Ragu Bolognese. The very word Soffritto originates from the Italian verb Soffriggere, which means to “to stir fry”. In Italy, Soffritto consists of finely chopped white onion, celery and carrot which are fried for 5 minutes.

There are variants of Soffritto in other cuisines. For instance, if you are cooking a Creole/Cajun Gumbo, you start with frying diced white onion, carrot and bell pepper. The difference is that the carrot has been swapped for bell pepper.

In France, the Soffritto is called Mire-poix, and consists of 2 parts white onions, 1 part celery and 1 part carrot.

Ergo, there are different versions of Soffritto. However, whenever you cook for instance the Gumbo or a french mire-poix, you should always adapt the Soffritto recipe below, and discard the relevant part in the recipe you follow.

My Soffritto Recipe

1 part white onion
1 part carrot
1 part celery
0.5-1 dl olive oil
Salt to taste
Non vegan version: High quality fish sauce, instead of salt

I normally cook a large batch of Ragu Bolognese, using 1 kg carrots, 1 kg onion and a whole celery, so there are leftovers to eat for a couple of days (it is so tasty) or to make a yummy vegan Lasagna.

I do not want to finely chop all vegetables by hand because it is a pain. Instead I usually grate the carrots on a grater, or use a food processor to mince everything, which I recommend.

Here is finally the secret that makes my Soffritto superior:
Fry the vegetable mix for 1 hour.

Let the vegetable mix fry in lot of olive oil on medium heat. Fry until the mix has “melted” down and reduced to less than half its starting volume. This process usually takes 45-60 minutes for my large batch. I usually put a lid on the pot to stop the mix from becoming too dry and burn. Cooking time can reduce with less vegetables and a larger surface on the cooking pot. If you have say, one small onion, one carrot and one celery stalk, it could maybe take only 30(?) minutes, but a true soffritto should never fry for less than 30 minutes. If there is lot of water, remove the lid for a while and let the water evaporate. If the mix starts to burn you need to lower the heat. When cooked for close to 1 hour, the mix should taste really, really good. You should want to eat the mix as is. If not, you should probably fry it longer.

Q: How do you know if your Soffritto needs to cook longer?
A: Tilt the pot and free an area. Then olive oil should slowly trickle down, and the color of the oil should be like gold, or yellow like you have added Saffron. If the oil that trickles down is not yellow, cook the Soffritto another 10 minutes. If no oil trickles down, add more oil.

Don’t forget to add salt. The salt is very important, because it makes everything sweeter. Try to add salt and see how the taste becomes sweeter.

If you are cooking the non vegan version, you use fish sauce instead of salt. It will not taste fish in the end. I use fish sauce instead of bouillon cube or vegetable stock. Fish sauce lifts the taste even more, and make it fuller and rounder. Try it, you might like it! But be careful if it is the first time, add just a very little fish sauce and see how the taste develops. Myself add quite much salt or fish sauce, maybe 0.5 dl fish sauce for a large batch of Bolognese.

Thats it. All recipes that say you should fry the vegetables for 5-10 minutes are dead wrong. If you fry them for only 5-10 minutes, the flavours don’t have time to develop. So aim to fry a Soffritto close to 60 minutes. If you really are in a hurry, you can fry them for 45 minutes. Less than that, and you should probably cook another dish instead. Remember, Soffritto is sloooow food, and with love comes the taste. People dont understand that, they think they can make a tasty Soffritto in 5 minutes. No can do.

Dont forget to check our vegan Ragu Bolognese which is tastier than meat Ragu Bolognese. Or, you could also check our vegan carrot rice that even picky children love. Both of these recipes use this Soffritto as a base.

Questions?