leo i

Roast stuffed peppers (gemista)

A friend asked me for my recipe for stuffed peppers, so I thought I’d put it up here as well. There are several variants of the recipe.  just about each Greek family has its own. The three types of recipes that are most popular among greeks are: stuffed with rice, stuffed with mix of rice and ground beef, and stuffed with cheese. The recipes are the same except for the stuffing, really.

For the rice (or rice and beef), for 6 peppers you need:

• required ingredients
• 1.5 cup of rice (I really like basmati)
  or
  1 cup of rice and 1 lbs of ground beef
• 1 cup of chopped parsley
• 1/4 cup of chopped spearmint or mint
• 1 cup of diced onions
• 2 garlic gloves, minced
• 2 cups of diced tomatoes (canned work perfectly)
• salt, pepper
• 1/2 cup of olive oil
• optional ingredients
• diced mushrooms (to taste about 1/2 cup)
• diced jalopenos (to taste, about 1/4 cup)
• 2-3 tablespoons of pine nuts (not chopped)
• 1/2-1 cup of crumbled feta

(note on the ingredients: optional ingredients reflect my modifications and experimentation over the years; I am probably using about 1/4 less oil that grannie’s recipe!)

Preparation:

Use half the oil in a large sauce pan to cook the onions in medium fire until translucent. Add beef and let it brown. Add a pinch of salt and pepper. Add the herbs and the garlic, steer over medium fire for 5 more minutes. Add optional ingredients (except for feta), steer 2 minutes. Add tomatoes, still in high fire for 5 minutes. Return fire to medium, add rice. Steer occasionally until rice soaks up juices; you may want to add 0.5-1 cups of water (drop a beef cube if you wish in the water first). Let mix rest for a while, and prepare the peppers. Now is also a good time to preheat the oven at 400F. Cut them on top, preserve the caps. Rinse and remove the seeds and, if necessary, do some careful deveining with a small pairing knife. Mix the feta in the rice. Stuff peppers but do not top them off; stop 1/4 inch below the rim. Arrange them upright in a baking pan, drizzle with the remaining oil. Bake for at least 60 minutes (optimal time 75 min, you should see the top rice grains blackening).

Serve with the caps on but warn people that caps are just decorative (though edible).

The typical greek dish, at least at home, was stuffed tomatoes and green bell peppers. We use large beef tomatoes, scoop the meat out, use it in the saucepan with the rice and the ground beef and baked in 375 for 1.5 hours. I am more font of the peppers though because the rice remains fluffy; the tomatoe, even with its meat removed, continues to release water in the rice while baking and the rice softens up too much.

This is a summer dish. You can refrigerate and serve cold for days.

If you want to be fancy — in the traditional greek way — serve the peppers on a plate adorned with a few anchovies or another salt curred but not smoked fish.

The stuffed peppers with cheese, is a bit different.

Stuffing:

• 2 cups of crumbled feta;
• 1/2 cup of mozarrela
• 1 egg
• 2 gloves of garlic, minced
• 1 cup of mushrooms diced
• 1/2 cup of finely diced bacon, or ham, or anything similar you like
• 1/4 cup diced jalopenos (optional but *good*)
• 1/4 cup chopped mint or spearmint
• 1-2 tablespoons pine nuts (not chopped)
• 2 table spoons olive oil
• pepper

In a frying pan, medium heat, sautee the mushrooms with the garlic, add a pinch of pepper. Cook until mushroom juice is gone. In a bowl mix the rest of the ingredients, add the mushrooms and mix a bit more. Stuff peppers and with previous recipe. Cook 400F preheated 1 hour. In this recipe, more so than the previous one, you got to make sure that the peppers stay upright throughout the baking, otherwise the cheese will leak away. Snuggle the peppers in a baking pan that will hold them up — no slack space between them in the tray.

People complaint that this is very cheese and overwhelming dish; like eating chicago style pizza. To cut down the cheeseness I’ve modified the recipe a bit to add more veggies: in the frying pan with the mushrooms I add chopped carrots and after all the mushroom juice is gone I add 1 can of diced tomatoes and a tablespoon of oil and cook at medium fire until the tomatoe juices begin to darken a bit.

You can also substitute the cured meat (because it does make the dish too salty, with all that feta) with ground beef (1/2 lbs) that you brown after you add the carrots to the mushroom mix and before you add the tomatoes.

Costco sells a kick ass feta. Surely it’s not what my father’s 2nd cousin of his sister-in-law’s brother used to make in his creamery before the European Union shut it down for unhygienic practice (though most of the family believe that it was probably his affinity to his goats that was more troublesome). But barring that, Costco sells a decent feta.

You can also get red bell peppers (by the half-dozen) at Costo. In the summer Costco usually carries clamshells of little colorful banana peppers in mixed colors (red, green, yellow, orange). These are great for stuffing with cheese, though a bit more difficult to stuff because of their small size. They are also a challenge to keep them upright in the pan. But they make a great dish with superb presentation and they’re ideal finger food for a party.

If you live in the Chicagoland: I find Caputo’s (on Harlem and Grand, north of Grand) to be one of the best source of produce. Their (spear)mint is phenomenal but it’s quite a drive to get there, and Harlem is a very slow street with all the little old italian matrons driving at 5 mph down the road heading to Caputo’s. While at Caputo’s you may want to get a jar or two of d’Agostino anchovy fillets preserved in oil; the ones cured in red pepper flakes have a bite and they are the perfect garnish for the rice stuffed peppers.

June 2nd, 2006 Posted by leo | Recipes | 3 comments