Stuffed Peppers Baked in Sour Milk Sauce

Preparing the peppers

1. To make stuffed bell peppers, it’s best to choose fairly large ones, so there is enough room for the filling. Though I actually like small peppers even more.

2. Prepare the peppers: wash them, pat dry with a napkin, then carefully pierce the skin near the stem, so the steam can escape while baking.

   

3. Roast the peppers in the oven or microwave. There is no need to bake them until completely soft, otherwise they won’t hold their shape. It’s enough for the peppers to become slightly less firm. The method of baking is up to you. But in any case, I recommend brushing the peppers with a little vegetable oil first, so the outer skin peels off better.

   

   If you like, peel the roasted peppers of their thin, film-like skin. For microwave roasting, you can put the peppers in a loosely closed plastic bag, and the skin will slip off like a glove.

Making the filling

1. Choose fairly fatty pork, such as shoulder or neck.

2. Grind the meat twice in a meat grinder.

   

3. Cook the rice: rinse it thoroughly and cook until fully done. As soon as the rice is ready, drain it in a colander and rinse with cold running water.

   Choose a small-grain rice that isn’t too crumbly. Then the filling will turn out creamy.

   

4. Fry the onion. Peel and finely chop it; you can take more of it, to your taste. Fry in a little vegetable oil over medium heat until golden.

   

5. Add the ground pork and fry, stirring often, in an open pan.

   

   Add the spices. For this amount of filling, add 0.5 tsp each of sweet ground paprika and dried savory, rubbed or crumbled. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

   

6. When the pork is browned, add the cooked rice and keep frying for another 5 minutes.

   

   Turn the heat down to minimum, cover the pan with a lid and simmer the filling for 10 minutes. With this method, the filling is practically ready by now.

   

Baking the peppers

1. Stuff the peppers with the filling, packing it in fairly tightly. Brush the stuffed peppers lightly with vegetable oil and place them in a baking dish.

   

   Put the dish in an oven preheated to 200°C. Cooking time is about 30 minutes. Since all ovens are different and the stuffed peppers are practically ready already, note when the juices running out start to boil and add 10 minutes; that will be enough.

Making the sauce and baking in it

1. Make the sauce while the peppers are in the oven.

2. Make the sauce base. Melt a piece of butter (40 g) in a frying pan. Add 1 tsp of flour (3 g) and quickly fry it, avoiding lumps. This is how the basic béchamel sauce is made.

   

   Then add 0.5 l of natural sour milk. Not store-bought kefir, but natural soured milk. Of course, that’s not easy to find. But you can buy a regular carton of milk in the store, checking the shelf life first. If the shelf life is a month or three, the milk will never go sour at all. If the shelf life is a few days, the milk is much more likely to be natural. Good milk sours to the right state in a couple of days.

   

   Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste and add a pinch of savory. You can add a little ground nutmeg on the tip of a knife. Cook the sauce over low heat, stirring.

3. Thicken the sauce. In a cup, mix 2 tsp of flour (7 g) with cold boiled water to make a thin batter. Strain the batter so no lumps remain. Pour it into the sauce in a thin stream, stirring constantly: the flour thickens the sauce this way. Let the sauce simmer under the lid over low heat for 5-7 minutes. The final consistency of the sauce should be like honey: thick, but still flowing.

   

4. Take the stuffed peppers out of the oven and pour the prepared sauce over them. Move the peppers around a little with a spoon so the sauce spreads evenly.

   

   Put the dish back in the oven and keep baking until the sour milk sauce comes to a boil. This doesn’t take long, 10 minutes at most.

   

Serving

1. Stuffed peppers get eaten while still hot, so I can’t say whether they can be eaten cold; I’ve never tried. By the way, it is very tasty sprinkled with finely chopped parsley.