This traditional recipe for stuffed bell peppers makes a simple one-pot meal. You can easily transform bell peppers into a flavorful dish that tastes just like childhood dinners at Grandma’s house with a few basic ingredients.
Old Fashioned Stuffed Bell Peppers Ingredient List
Green Peppers, tops removed with seeds discarded
If desired, the stuffing could include the following additions.
Dried herbs (parsley, oregano, basil, etc.)
Choice #1: Precooked Filling Or Uncooked?
The most standard way to make stuffed peppers is to prepare a filling, often by making rice and/or cooking meat and combining it with seasonings and cheese. Then you fill the pepper and bake until the pepper is tender (see info about cooking times and temperatures in the How To Cut It section below). A recipe in this style: Italian Stuffed Peppers by Well Plated.
Another great precooked stuffed pepper filling is leftovers. Leftovers of almost any kind. I’m serious. You can top it with cheese and add leftover spaghetti and meat sauce. mashed potatoes, leftover vegetables, and leftover roast or pulled pork combined (I’d still top it with cheese) Think about leftover chicken souvlaki stuffed peppers. Imagine your leftover chicken combined with pita dice, olives, perhaps some tzatziki mounded into peppers, and, yes, cheese—in this case, feta—topped with a garnish.
So you see, any leftovers can be used. Place them inside the peppers, sprinkle cheese on top, and bake until the peppers are soft and the filling is heated through (more information on cooking temperatures and times is provided below in the section titled “How To Cook Stuffed Peppers”).
Stuffed peppers can still be prepared even if you don’t want to prepare a filling, which can take some time, and you don’t have any leftovers. In fact, stuffed peppers can be a super-quick weeknight meal.
Consider mixing together some diced ham, bread cubes, chopped tomatoes, seasonings, and cheese for the simplest of stuffings (this is best in the halved version of stuffed peppers, explained in the Hot To Cut It section below). Similarly, an omelet mixture (eggs and any fillings you’d like) will cook in a halved pepper in the time it takes the pepper to soften. Here’s just such an eggy stuffed pepper recipe from my friends over at Healthy Family Project.
One thing that is more difficult to add raw to a stuffed pepper is an uncooked carbohydrate. Regular rice or pasta will not cook properly inside the pepper. Although, if you’re making your stuffed peppers in a slow cooker (something I’ve never done and so don’t have any advice on) I’ve seen stuffed pepper recipes that use uncooked couscous or other uncooked grains.
I frequently cut uncooked chicken meat into bite-sized pieces for a quick weeknight meal. I then loosely pile it into the pepper halves after tossing it with a little flour, seasonings, sauce, and cheese (of course!). In the time it takes the peppers to soften, the chicken is fully cooked. As the chicken cooks, the flour miraculously traps any dripping juices, preventing the interior from becoming completely saturated.
And keep an eye out because later this week I’ll be bringing you another raw filling that is absolutely absurd. It’s Buffalo Chicken Stuffed Peppers, and I just can’t keep it a secret!
You cook rice and mix it with raw ground beef seasonings and sometimes a sauce. The rice soaks up the juices let off from the cooking beef. Very tasty. Here’s an example of a stuffed pepper recipe that uses cooked rice and raw beef from Simply Recipes.