Baked Stuffed Peppers with Porcini Mushrooms and Cheese

Preparing and baking the peppers

1. Simply baking peppers is easy, but such peppers suit an appetizer or a bell pepper salad. For a main course, it is better to stuff the peppers before baking. Traditionally peppers are stuffed with a mix of pork, fried onion and rice. But it is much easier to stuff them with porcini fried with onion and a minimum of spices. Depending on the size of the mushrooms, you will need just two or a few more. The leftover mushroom filling also makes an excellent sandwich, and you will not regret it! If you have no porcini, you can use champignons or oyster mushrooms.

   

   Baked peppers stuffed with mushrooms are best made from small, round peppers with thick flesh. This is simply much more convenient, because a round pepper sits steadily in the baking dish and does not tip over and spill the filling. Small peppers are also handy for serving by the portion. And make sure in advance that the peppers are not hot at all, otherwise the aroma and flavor of the mushrooms will simply disappear. It is better to add sliced hot pepper to the finished dish, if you like.

   

2. Prepare the peppers: wash them and wipe them dry. With the tip of a sharp knife, cut out the stem in a circle. You should get a round opening 3-4 cm in diameter, big enough to fill the peppers with an ordinary teaspoon. Remove the seeds and any noticeable bits of the inner membranes from the cavity. Try not to damage the pepper walls.

   

3. Bake the peppers until half done at 220-230°C, for up to 1 hour: the pepper is fairly fleshy and holds a lot of moisture, so it should be stuffed when almost baked. Place the cleaned peppers in a baking dish and put them in the preheated oven. There is no real need to oil the peppers before baking, but if you like, you can brush the outside with a very small amount of vegetable oil.

   Judge doneness by eye: as soon as the peppers start to brown and shrink, they are ready for the filling.

Making the porcini filling

1. While the peppers are baking, fry the onion: heat the olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat, peel the onion and chop it finely with a knife. Fry the onion in the olive oil until golden and slightly browned.

   

2. Fry the mushrooms with the onion. The porcini do not need to be boiled. Wash the mushrooms and clean off sand and any other debris. Chop them into not too large pieces, about twice as large as the vegetables for a vinaigrette salad. Add the chopped mushrooms to the fried onion and stir. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Without covering the saucepan, fry the mushrooms with the onion for 7-8 mins, stirring.

   

3. Lightly salt the fried mushrooms with onion and add a little black pepper. Use very little pepper, so that its aroma sets off the porcini rather than overpowers them. Turn off the heat at once and cover the saucepan with a lid. The filling should cool a little while the peppers are getting ready.

   

Stuffing the peppers and baking them under cheese

1. Stuff the peppers. When the peppers in the oven have started to brown and have lost some of their moisture and begun to shrink, take the dish out and set it on a cutting board, because the dish is very hot. Leave the oven on. With a teaspoon, fill each pepper with the fried mushrooms and onion. Do not pack it tightly or heap it up. Just divide the filling evenly among all the vegetable cups so that 2-3 mm remains to the top edge.

   

2. Grate the hard cheese on a fine grater and lay it over the filling of each pepper like a cap. Use 1-1.5 tsp of cheese (2–3 g) per pepper. Do not brush the cheese with mayonnaise!

   

   If for some reason hard cheese is not an option, you can brush the filling with a sauce or leave it as it is. A pepper with a mushroom filling also looks very striking if, shortly before it is done, you slip an egg yolk with some of the white on top of the filling. For that the peppers must be a little larger and you should use less filling, so the egg does not run over the edge.

3. Return the prepared, stuffed vegetables to the oven and bake at the same temperature for 15-20 mins: hard cheese melts quickly and in that time it begins to set and turn golden brown. This technique is called gratinating and is very often used when baking all sorts of dishes. Since the pepper itself and the filling are already ready to eat, do not overbake the peppers. Just wait until the cheese melts and a crust forms.

Serving

1. Put the finished baked peppers on plates and sprinkle them with finely chopped parsley. If you like, serve them with sliced raw vegetables, a sliced hot pepper, herbs and a wedge of lemon.

   

   Baked peppers with a mushroom filling are served hot and need no special side dish. This is a perfectly self-sufficient dish, tasty and filling. Unlike most stuffed pepper recipes, these peppers are cooked without water and with very little fat.