Peppers stuffed with meat in tomato sauce: recipe with photo

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

The recipe for stuffed peppers is a lifesaver for many housewives. This dish has a relatively low cost, does not require special cooking talent, and its taste is simply excellent. It can be served not only for dinner or lunch, but also decorate the festive table with it. This dish is especially well suited for the vegetable season, when peppers are filled 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 peppers 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 their usual menu.

Required Ingredients

To cook stuffed peppers in tomato sauce, it is advisable to use young seasonal vegetables. This dish is very beautiful and bright if you cook it from multi-colored peppers. The main condition is that they should be approximately the same size.

In the cold season forTo prepare the gravy, you can use tomato paste or juice, and in summer and early autumn, ripe tomatoes are well suited for the recipe. To diversify the texture of the gravy, use carrots, garlic and onions. These vegetables will add a special flavor to the dish.

Beef and ground 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.

Both round and long-grain varieties can be used as a rice base for this dish. A cut will do.

All kinds of spices are suitable for this dish. To give a spicy oriental note, prepare a pinch each of coriander and cumin. Fans of aromatic spices will certainly appreciate the subtle aromas of rosemary, thyme, marjoram. Red sweet paprika, added to the gravy, will reveal the aroma of bell pepper even more, and also give the dish a noble ruddy hue. Well, those who believe that foods such as vegetables and meat are good without an abundance of seasonings can limit themselves to a small pinch of allspice black pepper.

Proportions of products

One kilogram contains 12-14 peppers on average. This amount is enough for 4 servings. Therefore, if you are waiting for guests whom you plan to treat with stuffed meat, calculate how much food you need based on the proportions presented.

We need the following:

• bell pepper - 1 kg;
• minced meat - 450g;
• rice (raw) - 1 cup;
• 1 cup tomato juice or 3-4 ripe tomatoes;
• carrot - 1 piece;
• onion - 2 pcs;
• vegetable oil for frying;
• s alt and spices to taste;
• broth (meat or vegetable) for stewing;
• flour - 1 tbsp. l. (optional, to thicken the gravy).

An optional ingredient is sour cream. You can add a couple of tablespoons to the sauce.

It is worth mentioning one more ingredient that is often put in minced meat in the Caucasus. It's about crushed walnuts. This product makes the structure of the dish very unusual, but the taste of the main ingredients does not drown out, but only delicately emphasizes. If you want to try it, add about 200 grams of nuts, chopped with a knife into small pieces, to the minced meat. In this case, rice will need 2/3 cup.

Preparation of minced meat

Cook rice until tender, trying to evaporate all excess moisture (it will take exactly 2 cups of boiling water).

One onion finely chopped and fry in oil until translucent and golden.

When the rice has cooled, combine it with minced meat, mix, add onion, s alt and spices.

Stuffing

Rinse 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 off “lids” themselves are used in the further process if desired, more for a decorative purpose (the stuffing will not fall out without them).

You can stuff peppers with meat using a teaspoon. Pack the filling tightly so that there is novoids. You can fill the "cups" to the top.

Cooking tomato sauce

Chop the second onion and carrots in any convenient way. You can use a grater or just cut the vegetables into cubes.

Heat oil, add vegetables, fry over medium heat, stirring occasionally.

Turn tomatoes into tomato puree using a meat grinder or blender. Bring the volume of the resulting mass to 250 ml by diluting it with water. If using tomato paste, dissolve 2 tablespoons in water or broth, mix thoroughly. Pour juice, tomato puree or water with dissolved pasta into the pan and simmer the vegetables.

If the meat-stuffed pepper sauce isn't thick enough for you, add some flour and let it boil.

Extinguishing process

Some step-by-step recipes for meat-stuffed peppers require you to put the "cups" cut-side up in the stewpan. This is not necessary if your minced meat is quite dense. During stewing, it will not fall out of the pepper. Try to stack the filled vegetables as close to each other as possible.

When the saucepan or saucepan is full, carefully pour in the gravy. Use the broth to bring the volume of liquid to such a level that all the vegetables are completely covered.

Stuffed peppers should be stewed over low heat. It is violent boiling that can cause loss of shape.

During the extinguishing, it is necessary to periodically look under the covers. Signalreadiness is the darkening of the meat filling, as well as the translucency of the walls of the pepper. The total stewing time averages 40 minutes.

Cooking stuffed peppers 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.

Grease the bowl with a small amount of vegetable oil, load the carrots and onions cut into cubes. Set the "Frying" mode and cook vegetables without closing the multicooker lid. Stir until carrots and onions cook evenly. After 10 minutes, pour in the tomato juice, add seasonings and s alt, wait for it to boil in the same mode.

Peppers filled with rice and minced meat, gently put in a bowl, as close as possible to each other. If there is not enough liquid, you can add broth or boiling water.

Further cooking can be done in the "Stew", "Bake" or "Bake" mode for thirty minutes.

"Boats" in the oven

This way of cooking differs from the classical one, but is not inferior to it in any way. Let's try cooking pepper halves stuffed with meat and rice in the oven.

Step-by-step review of the recipe, let's start with 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, foldon a greased baking sheet.

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 ensure that the carrots and onions fall on top of the minced meat. Bake the dish in a preheated oven for about 30 minutes. To make the dish even more delicious and beautiful, shortly before the end of cooking, you can put a handful of grated cheese on a grater on each “boat”.

Serving and serving

Stuffed peppers are served as a hot appetizer or as an independent dish. You can garnish with herbs before serving. Guests should offer table knives and forks.

Aromatic white bread, homemade pickles, seasonal vegetable salads, pickled mushrooms are great with this dish.

We looked at the basic recipes for making 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 deserves to take its place in every housewife's cookbook.