How to Make Dolma Biber
So now that I stuffed our second pida, I’m preheating our oven to 300 degrees and I’m going to coat them with the egg yolk. Now, the egg yolk makes it crispy, light and fluffy but if you don’t like egg, you don’t have to use it. This just makes it really pretty and golden brown and you just want to brush it, oil top of the dough. Now, this pida is going to go great with our soup, our chicken soup and it also goes great with our stuffed peppers because you know in Turkey we love to complement each other with the different types of dishes and cuisines. Just brush it, it doesn’t matter, just get it rolled. And now, we’re going to take this and put them in the oven and let them bake for about 20 minutes and now let’s start preparing our stuffed peppers.
Now, while we’re waiting for our pidas to cook, we’re going to prepare the stuffing for our stuffed peppers. We have three ounces of corn oil, half of squeezed lemon juice, one cup of washed rice, one cup of onion, pepper, salt, two teaspoons sugar, two teaspoons of mint, a tablespoon of tomato paste, two cloves of garlic, one teaspoon of allspice and one cup of parsley.
So, we’re going to wait for our oil to get nice and hot. Put in our onions and let them cook and caramelize for about five to seven minutes. You really want that to sizzle. Now, one thing about zeytinyagli you make that, all of them have sugar in it. When you have a zeytinyagli dish you know that there’s some sort of sugar in it so we’re going to put that in after our onions caramelized. Now, we’ll put in our sugar, two teaspoons, one, two and we’ll put in our washed rice and just stir that in back and forth. Put in our lemon juice, and the garlic. Now, you could already smell the aromas of the spices. Really smells delicious. Now, we’re going to let the rice soak up all of the juices before we put in our seasoning. Now, we’ll put in our tomato paste and all of our seasoning. Now, you can also make this with meat. That would be more of a dinner but this is served at room temperature or cold as an appetizer and it goes great with our soup and our pida. So, now we’re going to do a teaspoon of allspice and two teaspoons of mint. One, two, I will put in our parsley.
Now that we’ve mixed in all our seasonings, I’m going to turn it off and cover it and now, we’re going to start preparing our peppers to be stuffed. Now that the stuffing is done, I’m going to open the lid and let it cool and get our pot ready because we still need to stuff the peppers and put them in a different pot. So, I have this smaller right here because I only have six peppers and what I have here is the stems from the parsley that I use to wrap my cooking. I save them because when I make dolma, it’s good to line the bottom of the pot so that it doesn’t stick. Anytime you make any type of dolma, it’s really good to line the bottom. So, when I use parsley or dill or watercress, I like to save my stems. Right now, I’m going to take an Italian pepper and show you how I cut the head.
So now usually, this dish is made with bell peppers but here in the states the bell peppers are really big. Once in a while when you find them small, it’s nice and you can buy those because those are much more presentable, but usually they are very big and it doesn’t look presentable to stuff that and give that to somebody as an appetizer so I like to use the green peppers. And if they are orange in color, that’s okay too, it just makes it a little more pretty. You just want to take out the inside and then what I'll do is with my teaspoon, just take the stuffing and put it in. Sometimes, you can even use your fingers. That’s okay. In Turkish homes, many people use their finger. Just make sure your hands are clean.
Now, what you can do at this point is take the head and put it back on. But what I like to do, make it look a little more presentable. Let’s take a tomato, cut around in piece and use that as the head, just like that and I like to place it in downward. Now, it’s okay if your stuffing is not completely cooked because it’s still going to cook with the boiling water for about a half an hour. And this is our last pepper that we’re stuffing. As you could see we have a little stuffing left over and that’s not too bad. Get our coating. Now, once all this is stuffed, you want to put it in the pot, downward facing each other. Now for this, we need to cook in upside down plate because you don’t want it to open while you’re cooking. Once you put the plate, you put about a cup of boiling water. Just use your judgment. You don’t want it totally covering like when you do great leaves. Just want enough water for it to cook and soak up. Remember, your stuffings are already half cooked. So now that the water is in, we’re going to put it back on the stove top, let that cook for about a half an hour and then we’re going to check on our delicious pidas and see how they’re doing. The smell is coming to me from behind, so don’t go away.
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