You can use sofrito when making Puerto Rican Rice with Pigeon Peas (Arroz con Gandules) and Shrimp in Creole Sauce (Camarones a la Criolla). It’s also great in Latin-based dishes like fajitas, different rices, and beans. Add it to soups and curries — pretty much any recipe where you’d use peppers and onions, you can add a cube or two of sofrito in their place.

Buy sazón, an annatto-based spice mixture, in the Latin foods aisle at your grocery store, at Latin markets, and online. Fresh culantro is an herb similar to cilantro in flavor, but stronger. It can often be found in Latin and Asian food stores and goes by other names such as recao, shadow benni, or sawtooth herb. If you can’t find culantro, just substitute more cilantro. If you happen to find fresh ají dulce peppers, you can add a handful; they resemble Scotch bonnet peppers in size, shape, and color but are not hot. They’re sweeter and smokier in flavor. The recipe is a Yummly original created by Reina Gascon-Lopez.