Ardei umpluți
Stuffed peppers
Peppers stuffed with rice and mince, stewed in tomato sauce and served with soured cream
Photo: Alice Wiegand, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ardei umpluți are peppers stuffed with rice, minced meat and herbs, stewed in a tomato sauce and served with soured cream. In Moldova you will also often hear the name chiperi umpluți, from the regional word chiper for pepper. The dish is known throughout the region, from Romania to the Balkans; a version with just rice and vegetables suits the fasting periods.
Origins and history
Stuffed vegetables are a legacy of the same Ottoman and Balkan cuisine that gave rise to sarmale: fill a vegetable or leaf with rice and minced meat and let it cook slowly. In the Republic of Moldova many people call the pepper chiper, hence the name chiperi umpluți that you will come across on menus and at markets alongside the standard Romanian ardei umpluți.
What goes into it
The filling is very similar to that of sarmale: minced pork or a pork and beef mix, briefly parboiled rice, fried onion and carrot, and a generous amount of dill and parsley. The peppers are cut open at the top, seeded, filled and stood upright in a pan or ovenproof dish. They cook in a sauce of tomatoes or passata with water, sometimes finished with a little flour or soured cream to thicken it. For the fasting days of the Orthodox calendar there is a meat-free version with rice, vegetables and herbs. The difference from sarmale lies mainly in the wrapping: the pepper itself gives sweetness and juice to the sauce, so the dish tastes fresher than the cabbage rolls. Because it cooks in one big pan and reheats well, it is a typical family dish.
Where and how to try it
Ardei umpluți are above all a home-cooked dish of late summer, when peppers are piled high at the markets. Restaurants serving Moldovan food often have them on the menu too. They come to the table hot with a spoonful of smântână and fresh bread. Reheated the next day, they taste at least as good.
Ardei umpluți
Ingredients
Method
- Cut a lid off the peppers and remove the cores and seeds.
- Fry the onion and carrot in the oil for 5 minutes. Boil the rice for 5 minutes in plenty of water and drain.
- Mix the minced meat, rice, half the onion and carrot, half the herbs, 1 tsp salt and pepper.
- Fill the peppers loosely (the rice will still swell) and stand them upright in a large pan or ovenproof dish.
- Mix the passata, water, sugar, the rest of the onion and carrot and a little salt, and pour this around the peppers. Cover and stew gently for 50 minutes or cook in an oven at 180 °C.
- Sprinkle with the rest of the herbs and serve hot with soured cream.
