We chose a variety of sized peppers at our local grocery store. Our favorite pepper was the banana pepper when we first tried these. Go with whatever kind you prefer though. You really can't go wrong. Just remember that you will be trying to wrap these with bacon...if the pepper is too big that gets a little more challenging. Here's our cooking steps:
- After removing the tops and cleaning out the seeds and veins, I made the filling. We used a combination of cream cheese, sour cream, shredded mozzarella cheese, and shredded cheddar cheese. We eyeballed the ingredients. As long as you have a good amount of each, you'll be good to go.
- Next we stuffed each pepper with a good amount of the filling and then inserted a skewer through the bottom of the pepper, replaced each pepper's top, and stuck the skewer through it, too. I heard that this helps to keep the stuffing inside as the peppers cook. I also decided to use long skewer sticks to help when rotating the peppers as they cooked.
- Finally, we wrapped each pepper with a slice of bacon. This part was challenging in my opinion. You can't overlap the bacon too much or it won't cook thoroughly. But some overlap is needed to help keep each slice on the pepper. This is where pepper size makes a big difference. The bigger the pepper, you risk having gaps in the bacon. The smaller the pepper the more overlap you'll have with the bacon (unless you cut the strips down).
- Once the bacon was on, we popped these on the griddle and cooked and rotated.
...And cooked and rotated...and lost some cheese and pepper tops... and cooked and rotated...oh my gosh these things took forever to cook! Good things are worth waiting for, right? Clearly we found out that using a grill is the preferred method of cooking these suckers. The bacon kept getting stuck on the griddle, the cheese oozed out all over the place. It got messy.
When they were finally done (i.e., when we decided that we were so hungry that we couldn't wait any longer) they did end up being delicious.
Happy eatings!
