Armenian Summer Dolma (Stuffed Vegetables)
In summer, when peppers and eggplant ripen, Armenians make not grape-leaf rolls but a vegetable dolma: sweet peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes stuffed with fatty beef and lamb, rice, cilantro, and cumin, then left to braise under a tomato-garlic sauce for an hour and a half. The name comes from the Turkic doldurma, meaning “to stuff.”
This is a family recipe from Zhanna Levina, wife of the Armenian comedian Garik Martirosyan. Juiciness comes down to fat: lean ground meat gives a dry, tight filling, so choose beef with some marbling, and cook the rice only halfway, since it finishes inside the vegetables.
- Don’t toss the tomato flesh you scoop out; it becomes the base of the braising liquid, and any extra can line the bottom of the pot so nothing scorches.
- Pack the vegetables snugly and add liquid until it nearly covers them, so everything cooks evenly.
Serve hot with a spoonful of matsoni (an Armenian cultured milk much like thick, tangy yogurt; plain full-fat Greek yogurt or sour cream works) mixed with crushed garlic. It’s even better the next day, once the vegetables have fully soaked up the sauce.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Make the meat filling, ideally from fatty beef with lamb added. Grind the meat in a meat grinder.
Cook the rice until half done and rinse it under cold water.
Finely chop a bunch of cilantro with the onion and add it to the meat. Add the pepper, salt, and cumin and knead the filling.
Clean the peppers, trim the stems off the eggplant, and cut the tops off the tomatoes. Then scoop out the insides to make room for the filling, but don't throw them away.
Tightly fill the vegetables with the meat and place them in a large, deep, heavy-bottomed pot. Pour in a 3 cm layer of vegetable oil. Arrange the vegetables in layers: peppers, eggplant, tomatoes. The vegetables should sit snugly, and any gaps can be filled with little balls of the filling.
Make the pour: chop the tomato flesh, press the garlic into it, add salt and half a cup of water.
Pour the mixture over all the vegetables, scatter chopped basil on top, and set over medium heat. When the water comes to a boil, lower the heat, cover the pot with a lid, and wait an hour and a half.
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