Stuffed Pepper Soup

Stuffed Pepper Soup is ground beef, bell peppers and rice in a tomato beef broth that thickens as it cooks. It tastes exactly like stuffed peppers and happens in one pot. There’s Parmesan over the top, which is not traditional and is not up for debate.

Stuffing peppers is fiddly. You hollow them out, you par cook them so they’re not crunchy, you pack them full, and then you spend 10 minutes arranging them in a dish so they don’t fall over.

This is all of that in a bowl, and nothing has to stand up.

Ground beef, bell peppers, onion, rice and tomatoes in a beef broth. The rice cooks right in the pot and thickens everything as it goes, so by the end it sits somewhere between a soup and a stew.

I’ve got the Romanian version of the real thing on here too, if you ever feel like doing it the hard way.

I use one green and one red, and I’ll fight for both.

Green is the one that makes this taste like a stuffed pepper. It’s slightly bitter, a bit grassy, and if you’ve ever eaten a proper stuffed pepper that flavor is sitting in your memory whether you know it or not. Leave it out and you’ll have a perfectly nice beef and rice soup that’s missing something you can’t quite name.

Red is just a green pepper that stayed on the plant longer. Sweeter, softer, friendlier. On its own it would tip the whole pot toward sweet. Next to the green it evens things out.

Yellow and orange behave like red. Use whatever’s in the drawer. I’m not checking.

All green is the traditional version and it’s what you want if you grew up on this.

All red is sweeter and gentler, which comes in handy if you’re feeding somebody who has publicly announced they don’t like peppers.

• Ground beef (1 pound): Regular or extra lean, both fine. Turkey, chicken, pork or Italian sausage all work too if that’s what you’ve got.
• Olive oil (1 tablespoon) and butter (1 tablespoon, unsalted): Both, and yes you need both. The oil keeps the butter from burning, the butter browns the beef better than oil manages alone.
• Onion (1 large, chopped), carrot (1 medium, chopped) and celery (2 stalks, chopped): The usual starting lineup. Nothing surprising here.
• Green bell pepper (1 medium, chopped) and red bell pepper (1 medium, chopped): One of each, for the reasons I just went on about at length.
• Garlic (3 cloves, minced): In at the end of the sauté, 30 seconds and no longer.
• Tomato paste (1 tablespoon): A small amount doing a lot. It deepens the broth without turning this into tomato soup.
• Long grain rice (¾ cup, uncooked): Raw, straight into the pot. This is doing more than you think.
• Dried oregano (½ teaspoon) and dried basil (½ teaspoon): Simple on purpose. This soup doesn’t need a herb garden.
• Salt (½ teaspoon, plus more to taste): Start small. There’s a bouillon cube coming and it has opinions.
• Beef bouillon (1 cube): Where the beefy depth comes from. It’s a shortcut and I’m not apologizing.
• Beef broth (6 cups, low sodium): Low sodium, because of the aforementioned cube.
• Diced tomatoes (28 ounces, 1 can): The big can, not the small one.
• Parmesan (½ cup, grated, for serving): Nowhere near a traditional stuffed pepper. Completely correct in this soup.

Brown the beef: Melt the 1 tablespoon of butter with the 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the 1 pound of ground beef and cook 3 to 5 minutes, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as you go. You want small crumbles with some real browning on them, so leave it alone for a bit instead of stirring constantly.

Add the vegetables: In goes the chopped onion, carrot, celery and both bell peppers. About 3 minutes, just until the edges soften. They’ll carry on cooking in the broth, so you’re not trying to finish them here.

Wake up the garlic: Add the 3 minced garlic cloves and cook 30 seconds, until you can smell it. Don’t wander off. This is the fastest step in the recipe and the easiest one to ruin.

Add the paste and rice: Stir in the 1 tablespoon of tomato paste and the ¾ cup of uncooked rice and give it a minute. The paste darkens a shade and coats everything, which is exactly what you want.

Build the soup: Add the ½ teaspoon oregano, ½ teaspoon basil, ½ teaspoon salt, some pepper, the bouillon cube, the 6 cups of beef broth and the 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes. Bring it up to a boil, drop it to a simmer, and let it go 30 minutes. Stir it now and then so the rice doesn’t settle and stick on the bottom.

Check and season: It’ll have thickened noticeably, which is supposed to happen. Too thick for you? Splash in more broth. Taste it now, quietly, before anybody else gets a spoon in there.

Serve: Ladle it out and grate Parmesan over every bowl. Be generous about it.

The rice goes in raw and that’s on purpose, so don’t cook it first and don’t let anybody talk you out of it. As it simmers it lets go of its starch into the broth, and that starch is what turns this from a thin tomato soup into something with real body. Free thickening, costs you nothing but 30 minutes of not paying attention.
The catch is it never quite stops. The soup thickens on the stove, thickens again as it cools, and by tomorrow lunchtime it’s basically a stew. I’m fine with that. If you’re not, splash broth in when you reheat and it comes straight back.
Brown rice works. Give it 45 minutes instead of 30 and another cup of broth to get there.
Making it ahead on purpose? Cook the rice separately and spoon it into the bowls instead. The soup keeps its broth and you can reheat it as often as you like.

• Ground turkey or chicken: Leaner and lighter. Go a little heavier on the salt, since there’s less fat carrying the flavor around.
• Italian sausage: My favorite swap by a distance. Mild or hot, casings off, and cut the oregano and basil to ¼ teaspoon each because the sausage turns up with its own.
• Ground pork: Richer, and very good against the green pepper.
• More vegetables: Zucchini or mushrooms, in with the onion and carrot.
• Cheesy: A handful of shredded mozzarella stirred into each bowl, which is also not traditional, and which I do anyway.

Fridge: 4 days in an airtight container.

Fair warning about the rice, which I brought up above and am bringing up again because it catches people out: it keeps drinking the broth. Day 2 is thick, day 3 is thicker. Add liquid when you reheat and stop worrying about it.

Freezer: 3 months. If you’re planning ahead, freeze it without the rice, because rice goes slightly grainy after a stint in the freezer. Freeze the whole thing and it’s still good, just softer.

Reheating: Medium low on the stove with a splash of broth. A single bowl in the microwave is fine with a spoonful of water stirred through.

More stuffed peppers:

• Stuffed Peppers (Ardei Umpluti), the Romanian original
• Italian Stuffed Peppers
• Tex Mex Stuffed Peppers
• Deconstructed Stuffed Pepper Casserole
• Skinny Turkey Stuffed Peppers
• Stuffed Pepper Skillet on All My Cravings

More soup:

• Beef Barley Soup
• Chicken Barley Soup
• Minestrone Soup
• Homemade Chicken Soup

To go with it:

• Air Fryer No Knead Bread