Stuffed pepper recipe is a lifesaver for many housewives. This dish has a relatively low cost, does not require special chef talent, and its taste is simply excellent. It can be served not only for dinner or lunch, but also decorate them with a festive table. This dish is especially suitable for the season of vegetables, when peppers are poured with juice and aromas, and for gravy you can use not tomato paste, but ripe ground tomatoes.
The photos and step-by-step recipes of pepper stuffed with meat presented in our article will help to master the preparation of this dish for those who have never tried it, and those who want to diversify the usual menu.
Essential Ingredients
To cook peppers stuffed with meat in tomato sauce, it is advisable to use young seasonal vegetables. This dish turns out to be very beautiful and bright if you cook it from colorful peppers. The main condition is that they should be about the same size.
In the cold season, you can use tomato paste or juice to make gravy, and in the summer and early autumn, ripe tomatoes are good for the recipe. To diversify the texture of gravy, use carrots, garlic and onions. These vegetables give the dish a special flavor.
Ground beef and pork will give the dish a more expressive taste, fill it with a rich aroma. Minced chicken has a more delicate texture, attracts with a delicate taste.
As a rice base for this dish, you can use both round and long-grain varieties. A chop will do.
All kinds of spices are suitable for this dish. To add spicy oriental notes, prepare a pinch of coriander and zira. Fans of aromatic seasonings will surely appreciate the delicate aromas of rosemary, thyme, marjoram. Sweet red paprika added to the gravy will reveal the aroma of bell pepper even more and give the dish a noble ruddy hue. Well, those who believe that products such as vegetables and meat are good and without an abundance of seasonings can limit themselves to a small pinch of allspice black pepper.
Product proportions
One kilogram contains an average of 12-14 peppers. This amount is enough for 4 servings. Therefore, if you are waiting for guests who are planning to treat stuffed meat with bell pepper, calculate how many products are needed based on the proportions presented.
We will need the following:
- Bulgarian pepper - 1 kg;
- minced meat - 450 g;
- rice (raw) - 1 cup;
- 1 cup tomato juice or 3-4 ripe tomatoes;
- carrots - 1 pc.;
- onion - 2 pcs.;
- vegetable oil for frying;
- salt and spices to taste;
- broth (meat or vegetable) for stewing;
- flour - 1 tbsp. l (optional, to add gravity to gravy).
An optional ingredient is sour cream. You can add a couple of tablespoons to the sauce.
It is worth mentioning another ingredient that is often put in minced meat in the Caucasus. It is about crushed walnuts. This product makes the food structure very unusual, but the taste of the main ingredients does not drown, but only delicately emphasizes. If you want to try, add about 200 grams of nuts chopped into small pieces into the minced meat. In this case, rice will need 2/3 cup.
Minced meat preparation
Boil the rice until cooked, trying to evaporate all excess moisture (you will need exactly 2 cups of boiling water).
Finely chop one onion and fry in oil until translucent and acquire a golden hue.
When the rice has cooled, combine it with minced meat, mix, add onions, salt and spices.
Stuffing
Rinse the vegetables thoroughly, remove excess moisture with a paper towel. With a sharp knife, cut off the tops of the peppers to make “cups”. The cut “caps” themselves are used in the further process at will, more with a decorative purpose (the stuffing will not fall out without them).
You can stuff meat with pepper using a teaspoon. Stack the filling tightly so that there are no voids inside. You can fill the "cups" to the top.
Cooking Tomato Gravy
Grind the second onion, as well as carrots, in any convenient way. You can use a grater or just chop the vegetables into cubes.
Heat oil, add vegetables, fry over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
Turn tomatoes into mashed potatoes using a meat grinder or blender. Bring the volume of the resulting mass to 250 ml, diluting it with water. If you use tomato paste, dissolve 2 tablespoons in water or broth, mix thoroughly. Pour juice, tomato puree or water with dissolved paste into a pan and simmer vegetables.
If the pepper sauce stuffed with meat does not seem thick enough to you, add a little flour to it and wait for the boil.
Extinguishing process
Some step-by-step recipes of meat stuffed with pepper regulate folding “cups” in a stewpan with a cut up. This does not have to be done if your mincemeat is sufficiently dense. During stewing, it will not fall out of pepper. Try to stack the filled vegetables as compact as possible to each other.
Completely filling the saucepan or pan, carefully pour the gravy. Using the broth, bring the volume of liquid to such a level that all vegetables are completely covered.
Stuffing stuffed peppers should be on low heat. Exactly boiling can cause a loss of shape.
During extinguishing, periodically look under the covers. A signal of readiness is the darkening of the meat filling, as well as the translucency of the pepper walls. The total extinguishing time averages 40 minutes.
Cooking pepper stuffed with meat in a slow cooker
Modern technology can greatly facilitate the task and reduce the complexity of cooking. Let's look at a step-by-step recipe for peppers stuffed with meat and rice, which is suitable for a slow cooker.
Lubricate the bowl with a small amount of vegetable oil, load the carrots and onions, cut into cubes. Set the mode “Frying” and cook vegetables without closing the lid of the multicooker. Stir so that the carrots and onions are fried evenly. After 10 minutes, pour in tomato juice, add seasoning and salt, wait for boiling in the same mode.
Peppers stuffed with rice and minced meat, carefully fold in a bowl, as tight as possible to each other. If there is not enough liquid, you can add broth or boiling water.
Further cooking can be done on the "Stew", "Baking" or "Baking" for thirty minutes.
"Boats" in the oven
This cooking method differs from the classical one, but is in no way inferior to it. Let's try to cook in the oven halves of pepper stuffed with meat and rice.
We begin the step-by-step review of the recipe with the preparation. Pepper should be cut in half with a sharp knife, being careful not to damage the walls. Carefully remove partitions and seeds. Fill the resulting “boats” with stuffing from minced meat, sautéed onions and rice, put on a baking sheet, oiled.
For this dish, the same tomato sauce that we used in the previous case is suitable, but you can not dilute it with broth. Pour it over the "boats", trying to get the carrots and onions to fall on top of the minced meat. Bake the food in a preheated oven for about 30 minutes. To make the dish even more tasty and beautiful, just before the completion of cooking, you can put a handful of grated cheese on each gravy on each “boat”.
Serving and serving
Stuffed peppers are served as a hot snack or as an independent dish. Before serving, it can be decorated with greens. Guests should be offered table knives and forks.
Flavored white bread, homemade pickles, salads from seasonal vegetables, pickled mushrooms are perfect for this dish.
We examined the basic recipes for cooking stuffed peppers. Having mastered them, you can experiment with new ingredients and their proportions, for example, use minced pork or beef heart, and replace rice with millet or bulgur. This dish is worthy of taking its place in the cookbook of every housewife.