Stuffed Peppers: Turkish Style

Stuffed vegetables are one of the main and probably the most consumed  and loved dish in Turkish households. It can be stuffed in many different ways, as you wonder through the country, trying stuffed vegetables from different regions you can see many variations. Two main difference everywhere in the country is either stuffing them with ground meat filling or just with vegetarian filling. The meat filling can have different spices and also rice in it. My favorite is the one without meat so called "zeytin yagli". Another main distinction in this dish is stuffing either dried vegetables or fresh ones. In my opinion, if you are stuffing fresh vegetables i think you should make it vegetarian and for dried vegetables using a meat filling is a better option. Make sure you put loads of fresh dill when you are using meat in the filling. Vegetarian filling can be just rice and spices or in addition to that it can have pine nuts, sugar, and small sized dried grapes.  

Uncooked stuffed peppers 

In Turkey the most common stuffed vegetable is pepper, unlike Europe or US Turkey has smaller, crunchier, and of course better tasting peppers. So the size of the stuffed vegetable is much smaller sometimes it can even be a bite size. The second most popular vegetable is zucchini (courgette), and i think the third would be the dried eggplant (aubergine). Usually my mum throws couple of stuffed tomatoes into whatever stuffed vegetable she is  cooking. But if you are planning to do so as well i would advise you to use the oven. I will come to that in how to cook the stuffed vegetables. After stuffing the vegetable we usually close the top of the vegetable with a piece of tomato this will help you keep the stuffing inside the vegetable and the sour tomato will leave a beautiful flavor.

Another way of making stuffed vegetables is using grape leaves it is very common even in England you can find stuffed grape leaves but it is never as good as your mum's stuffed grape leaves if you are Turkish, Middle-eastern, or Greek . My parents usually stuff the grape leaves with vegetarian filling and it can be eaten cold or warm. When my grandmother or my mum is using meat filling they stuff the cabbage leaves. In the western part of the country around Aegean sea coast it is popular to stuff the pumpkin/zucchini flowers. 

Cooked stuffed pepper

The cooking is both straight forward and tricky. I usually boil them some people cook them in the oven which make sense if you are especially using tomatoes.  You don't want to overcook them the rice should be  still in good shape. I haven't manage to cook them perfectly yet but i will let you know when i do so. I will give you one i learned from my mother, if you are using fresh grape leaves and you want them to look green after cooking you want to slice lemons when you are boiling them.