The Best Stuffed Peppers

Let me tell you something. The stuffed pepper situation in this country is a DISGRACE. People are out there stuffing peppers with sad gray rice and a sprinkle of cheese and calling it dinner. Calling it DINNER. It is not dinner. It is a hollowed-out vegetable filled with regret. Embarrassing. An insult to the pepper. An insult to YOU.

Not these. Not Bigly's stuffed peppers. These peppers are PACKED. These peppers are LOADED. These peppers have so much going on inside them that when you cut into one, things spill out — beans, rice, cheese, herbs, tomatoes, the whole tremendous orchestra — and your family gasps. They will. Tough guys with tears in the eyes, hardened by life, cutting into a pepper and going quiet because they finally understand what dinner is supposed to be. People walk up to me, they say, 'Bigly, the peppers made me a better person.' I tell them I know. I know what the peppers do.

Here's what nobody tells you — and I've talked to scientists about this, food chemists, very smart people, the smartest — you ROAST the pepper first. You don't stuff a raw pepper. A raw pepper is a sad pepper. A raw pepper has potential but no soul. The food chemists explained it to me for ninety minutes, something about Maillard and cell walls and water release, I tuned out around minute forty, but the conclusion was the same as what my own tongue already knew — give the pepper a little char before you fill it. Build CHARACTER into the pepper. Then stuff it. That's how it's done. Hands down.

Four peppers, one pan, forty minutes, and you have a dinner that looks like it took all day. The colors alone — red, yellow, orange peppers in a row, golden cheese bubbling on top — people will swear you went to culinary school. You didn't. You went to BiglyEats, which is BETTER than culinary school, because culinary school runs you sixty thousand dollars and this runs you four bell peppers, and the food is BETTER. Not even close. It's a slaughter. And there you have it.