stuffed peppers or zeytinyağlı biber dolma

We have this supermarket called Gima in Auburn. For those of you who don’t know; Auburn is a suburb located in Western Sydney.  Gima was the name of a supermarket chain back in Turkey. Although it doesn’t exist there anymore, it is still alive in Auburn. The bigger portion of Turkish community lives in Auburn and because of that, Gima is doing incredibly well. We do our Turkish grocery shopping there, too. They sell anything that Australian customs allow into Australia –unfortunately, Turkish flour is not one of those things.

A little note on the peppers or capsicums that are used in this recipe: they look like the ones in the photo above. Their skin is thinner so they cook at the same time as your rice stuffing. Buy ones which are the same size.

Some Turks, grow certain Turkish vegetables around the area and you can buy them from the shops. So, when I spotted these peppers at Gima on one of our trips, I knew exactly what to do with them. The recipe I have here is my Mum’s. It’s funny, I never liked this dish when I was in Turkey but now it’s something that I can’t get anymore, it has have become one of my favourites.

Recipe Notes:
• Stuffed vegetables are incredibly difficult to give the right measurements for. It’s simply because that is not how you learn to make them. You sort of develop an eye for it and don’t need measurements along the way. It gives you a great sense of achievement when you get it right the first time.
• There is a difference between Istanbul style of stuffed peppers and Mediterranean style. As you move towards to the Eastern part of Turkey, things get hot and spicy. To make things even trickier, everyone’s version is different but at the end of the day, you can’t go wrong.
• A tip on creating lids for the peppers: If the lid part breaks apart while you are cutting the tops –which happens a lot –you could use sliced tomatoes as lids.

Here’s the recipe Peoples…

Turkish Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients:
• 8 small green peppers
• 1 cup medium-grain white rice, washed and rinsed
• 1 onion, chopped finely
• 1 tbsp dried currants
• 1 tbsp pine nuts
• 1 tsp dried mint
• ½ tsp ground allspice
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil (I used light olive oil)
• 1 tbsp flat leaf parsley
• Salt and pepper

Method:

1. Cut the tops of peppers and remove the stalks. Get rid of all the seeds and trim down the membranes too.
2. Mix together the onion, rice, oil, pine nuts, dried currants, mint, allspice, parsley, salt and pepper in a bowl.
3. Loosely stuff the peppers and put the lids back on.
4. Place them in a small pot and add some boiling water to the level of the lids. If you pass that mark, then the stuffing releases itself into the pot and you end up with half-stuffed peppers.
5. Cook the peppers over medium heat until their colour is slightly turning yellow and the rice is thoroughly cooked.
6. Let them cool in the very pot you’ve cooked them in and serve when cold.

Afiyet Olsun, Peoples!