My wife and I enjoy peppers stuffed with a meat/rice mix (with spices). We start with raw peppers and uncooked meat, and put the peppers in a small pot (or tagine) with tomato puree or tomato paste-based sauce around them, and cook for ~40 minutes. The result is usually to our liking (tasty, meat is cooked through, peppers are an appropriate firmness, etc.), with one exception: the peppers always burn on to the bottom of the pot. This puzzles me, since the tomato-based sauce around them boils gently or simmers, which I would have thought meant that there was enough liquid to keep the peppers from burning on. Apparently not!
Does anyone have methods for cooking this or a similar dish that avoids burning? (Again, the dish tastes great–the burnt-on pepper just complicates clean-up.)
Best Answer
You need a small wire grid to put on the bottom of your tagine. You can make one by cutting up an old cake cooling rack
Also consider baking for 3/4 of the time and then switching the oven to grill with the tagine lid off for the remaining 1/4 time (or thereabouts) . This should still keep them moist, but just lightly crisp the pepper tops without burning the tops or bottoms. These results are not to every tagine owners liking though