Stuffed Peppers with Pork and Rice in Tomato Sauce – Bulgarian Recipe
Stuffed peppers take me straight back to childhood. Some things are firmly tied to certain words in your head. Take these: ice cream is cold. Crayfish are fresh. Sausage is a vegetarian dish. Your salary is small. And pepper is… that's right, lad, BULGARIAN! (Across Eastern Europe, that's simply what everyone calls a bell pepper.)
Ah, Bulgaria!!! A God-blessed country of hardworking, polite and pleasant people. After all these years, the locals even say hello to me in the street.
The land of lecho, rakia, palachinki, kebapche, gyuvech, skara, sunflower seeds, chubritsa, shkembe chorba, eggs sunny-side up, Sunny Beach, tsatsa and, of course, Bulgarian peppers!
Among the amazing variety of Bulgarian cuisine, stuffed vegetables — “palneni zelenchutsi” — certainly hold a special place.
They range from humble cabbage or vine leaf rolls to stuffed eggplants. The brightest dish of all is bell peppers stuffed with meat and rice. You'll be offered stuffed peppers in every restaurant or mehana (a tavern in the national style with live music), without exception. Every place — no, every housewife — has her own unique, original recipe, and the dish is always wonderfully tasty.
Ingredients
2-4 servings
- Large bell peppers 4
- Pork (leg or shoulder) 0.5 kg
- Long-grain rice 0.5 cup
- Onion 1
- Salt, ground black pepper, sugar, vegetable oil, savory, flour, tomato paste to taste
- Sour cream, parsley to taste
Step-by-step recipe
- I'll admit, for stuffing I prefer green peppers, and very large ones. For this amount of rice and pork, 4 large ripe peppers are enough.
- Boil the rice in lightly salted water until almost done — 15 mins is usually enough. Drain in a colander and rinse under cold running water. Let it drain and transfer to a large deep bowl.
- Pick pork that isn't too fatty — shoulder or leg meat works great.
- Peel the onion, chop it finely and fry in sunflower oil until golden.
- Mince the meat through a fine grinder plate to get smooth ground pork.
- Mix the cooked rice with the fried onion and add to the ground pork.
- Season the filling with a little salt, dried savory and ground black pepper. In my experience, you can add quite a lot of savory — it is the main spice for aroma and what makes these peppers unique.
- Adjust the spices to taste. Mix everything thoroughly.
- Wash the peppers, cut off the tops with the stems — they will serve as lids for the stuffed peppers — and carefully remove the seeds and membranes with a knife.
- Fill all the peppers with the meat mixture and cover them with the cut-off tops.
- Place the peppers in a large pot and pour in boiling water from the kettle to cover them completely. Put the pot on the heat and cook for 40 mins.
- A few minutes before the end of cooking, carefully pour all the liquid from the pot with the peppers into another pot. Put this pot of liquid on the heat and bring to a boil. Add 1–2 tbsp of tomato paste — the tomato sauce should be quite tangy. Add 3–4 tbsp of sugar. The taste should be sweet and sour; season with salt and pepper.
- In a cup, mix 1–2 tbsp of flour with a cup of water. Pour this thin batter into the pot of liquid, stirring vigorously. When the sauce comes to a boil, let it bubble for 3–4 mins.
- Pour the sauce over the peppers. Cook for another 4–5 mins.
- Serve the peppers hot, and only hot — very hot. Sometimes they are served in small dishes warmed from below by a burner. But that's top class, on par with eating salo with garlic as a chaser — a job for professionals!
- Be sure to top the stuffed peppers with sour cream or natural sour milk and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
| Yield: | 2-4 servings |
| Calories: | 155 |
| Prep: | 30 mins |
| Cooking: | 60 mins |
| Ready in: | 1 h 30 mins |
| Category: | Main Dishes |
| Cuisine: | Bulgarian cuisine |
| Rating: |
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4.5
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