Sausage, rice, onions, and cheese combine to make this Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers recipe, which are a perfect weeknight dinner meal.
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I really love peppers. I’m a fan of red bell peppers if I’m eating them raw, but if my plan is to cook them, I’ll go with green bell peppers. They’re not sweet like the red, so they’re perfect in my Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers recipe.
Stuffed peppers are actually a really easy meal. Or two meals.
What I like about stuffed peppers is that any extra filling can be a meal in itself, in case you are serving someone who isn’t a pepper fan. Or if you just want to cook once and eat twice.
If you bought too many bell peppers for this recipe and you’re wondering what to do with them, our list of Peppers Recipes will give you some great ideas.
Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers Recipe
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Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers Ingredients:
- 1 cup white rice
- 2 cups water
- 6 green peppers
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- Salt and pepper
- 1 medium onion (red or white)
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 16 oz. ground sausage roll
- 2 teaspoons garlic salt
- 4 oz. shredded cheddar cheese
How To Make Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers:
Pre-heat the oven to 375 F.
Make the rice in a rice cooker. Rice to water in a rice cooker is a 1:2 ratio, so add the 1 cup of rice and 2 cups of water to the rice cooker and let it cook while you do everything else.
Wash the peppers.
Cut the tops off the peppers and set them aside.
You have two options for the pepper tops. You can either use them as decoration for when you’re serving the peppers (which is what we do) or you can chop them up and add them to the recipe later.
Clean out the insides of the peppers. Put the peppers in a cake pan with high sides. Drizzle the inside of the peppers with olive oil, then season generously with salt and pepper.
Chop the onion and sauté it about five minutes.
If you are planning on adding the chopped pepper tops to the mixture, you would add it to the pan with the onion. If you are using it as a garnish, omit this step.
Chop the garlic and add it to the pan. Cook another five minutes.
Add the sausage roll to the pan. Break it apart and let it cook through, about 15 minutes.
Add the cooked rice and garlic salt to the pan and stir until combined.
Stuff the peppers with the rice mixture and bake them for about 40 minutes or until the peppers are fork tender.
When the peppers are done, top with the shredded cheese and bake another five minutes until the cheese melts.
If you saved the tops of the peppers, top your Rice And Sausage Stuffed Peppers with the top before serving.
Serve warm.
What goes as a good side dish with Rice And Sausage Stuffed Peppers?
These Stuffed Peppers are a meal in themselves. You have meat, vegetables, and a starch, all in one complete package.
More vegetables in a meal is always good, though, so we suggest the following tasty vegetables as sides:
Rice And Sausage Stuffed Peppers: Frequently Asked Questions
This recipe makes enough filling to tightly pack six peppers. If you have some leftover Rice And Sausage Stuffed Peppers filling, you can actually just eat it on its own. We usually snack on some while we are waiting for the peppers to cook.
If you make four peppers instead of six, you can save the restraining filling and reheat it for dinner the next night. Make some vegetables to serve as a side dish with the filling and you’ll have a complete meal.
Ground sausage is the best to use in this Rice And Sausage Stuffed Peppers recipe. It breaks apart easily and incorporates into the rice mixture really well.
If you do use sausage links, use the links that have a thin casing that you can easily cut off. Then use the ground sausage from inside the casing.
Solid sausage links will work, if that’s all you can find in your local stores, but we don’t prefer those.
As far as flavoring, any sausage flavor works. Hot sausage will add a nice kick to this. Mild, pork sausage will add flavor but no spice. Sweet sausage is good, although that’s probably my third choice of the three.
Just choose what you like or what you can find on sale. If you do choose a mild or sweet sausage, taste the rice mixture after it’s done cooking but before you stuff the peppers in it. You may need to add more seasoning to compensate for a mild sausage.
Shredding a block of cheese works better in this recipe than using bagged, shredded cheese.
Shredded cheese that you buy in the grocery store has preservatives in it that keeps the cheese from melting together in the bag. But, those preservatives stop it from really melting when you’re trying to melt it.
A block of cheese that you shred yourself melts better because it doesn’t have those same preservatives.
So, when I’m making a recipe where I want the cheese to melt, I take the extra minute to shred the block of cheese myself. The difference is worth it to me.
We don’t boil peppers before stuffing them, although some recipes will call for that.
You can blanch peppers to help keep them crisp and to keep peppers from getting soggy while they cook.
But, really, this recipe calls for you to cook the peppers until they’re fork tender. So they do have a lot of integrity to them. They are crisp and aren’t soggy. So you don’t need to spend any time pre-cooking the peppers.
The only reason you may want to boil peppers before stuffing them is if you’re making these for a dinner party. The peppers will hold a better green color if you boil them for three minutes before stuffing them and cooking the peppers in the oven. So, if you want the stuffed peppers to look prettier, boiling is a way to do that. But, if you’re just making these for a weeknight dinner, my suggestion is don’t bother boiling the peppers.
A rice cooker is a game changer. It’s one of the kitchen tools that I think everyone should have. If you’re going to make rice, like ever, get a rice cooker.
You add a 1:2 ratio of rice to water in the rice cooker, push the button, and it makes perfectly cooked rice. That’s it. You don’t have to babysit it on the stove, stirring almost constantly, hoping the rice doesn’t cease or burn.
If you don’t have a rice cooker, stove-top cooked rice works in this recipe too. But I really like our rice cooker.
Personally, I find it a lot easier to cook stuffed peppers in a cake pan with high sides than anything else. It assures that the peppers will stay upright while cooking.
If you’re making a smaller version of this recipe, you can cook stuffed peppers in a bread pan.
A sheet pan could work too, in theory, but you risk the peppers falling over and making a mess.
Storing leftover stuffed peppers is really easy. Just leave the peppers in the cake pan you cooked them in and let them cool completely. Then, cover the pan in foil and keep it in the fridge. They’ll keep about four days that way.
If you want your leftover stuffed peppers to last about a week in the fridge, you’ll want to remove them from the cake pan and put them in an air tight container in the fridge.
Stuffed peppers are best when reheated in the oven. Heat the stuffed peppers in a cake pan in the oven at 350 F for about 15 to 20 minutes until the peppers are warm and heated through.
Don’t worry if the outside of the pepper chars when reheating. You can either pull that part off or just eat it.
Rice is a really good compliment to sausage. Plus, it takes up a lot of room in the peppers.
But, if you want, you can make sausage stuffed peppers without rice.
Instead of rice, you can stuff peppers with quinoa, couscous, orzo, pastina, or any similarly small pasta, or tuffing mix.
Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers
Sausage, rice, onions, and cheese combine to make these Sausage And Rice Stuffed Peppers, which are a perfect weeknight dinner meal.
Ingredients
- 1 cup white rice
- 2 cups water
- 6 green peppers
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- Salt and pepper
- 1 medium onion (red or white)
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 16 oz. ground sausage roll
- 2 teaspoons garlic salt
- 4 oz. shredded cheddar cheese
Instructions
- Pre-heat the oven to 375 F.
- Make the rice in a rice cooker.
- Wash the peppers. Cut the tops off the peppers and set them aside. Clean out the insides of the peppers. Put the peppers in a cake pan with high sides. Drizzle the inside of the peppers with olive oil, then season generously with salt and pepper.
- Chop the onion and sauté it about five minutes.
- Chop the garlic and add it to the pan. Cook another five minutes.
- Add the sausage roll to the pan. Break it apart and let it cook through, about 15 minutes.
- Add the cooked rice and garlic salt to the pan and stir until combined.
- Stuff the peppers with the rice mixture and bake them for about 40 minutes or until the peppers are fork tender.
- When the peppers are done, top with the shredded cheese and bake another five minutes until the cheese melts.
Nutrition Information
Yield
6Serving Size
1Amount Per Serving Calories 479Total Fat 31gSaturated Fat 8gTrans Fat 0gUnsaturated Fat 20gCholesterol 58mgSodium 1158mgCarbohydrates 38gFiber 3gSugar 5gProtein 15g
Have you tried our Rice And Sausage Stuffed Peppers? Let us know what you thought in the comments.