Stuffed Pepper Soup (Easy Keto Recipe)

Introduction

Stuffed peppers take a while. You brown the filling, hollow out the peppers, pack them, and then wait for them to bake. Stuffed pepper soup, which some people call unstuffed pepper soup, skips all of that. The beef, the peppers, the tomato and the rice all go into one pot instead, and the peppers get chopped into big pieces rather than used as the container. It’s on the table in about 35 minutes, and nobody has to wrestle a whole pepper with a knife and fork.

The one thing a keto version can’t keep is the rice. Regular rice is a big part of a stuffed pepper filling, and it’s where a lot of the carbs come from. This soup uses Miracle Rice instead: a shirataki rice made from konjac, which looks like small grains of rice in the bowl and has hardly any carbs.

What Goes In

• Lean ground beef: It browns in the pot with the onion and peppers from the start, and any grease gets drained off before the garlic goes in.
• Red and green bell peppers: They’re cut into large pieces rather than finely diced, so you get a proper bite of pepper in a spoonful the way you would from a stuffed one.
• Three kinds of tomato: Tomato paste gets a minute in the pot first, then diced tomatoes with their juice and tomato sauce make up the body of the broth along with the beef broth.

About the Miracle Rice

Miracle Rice is a brand of shirataki rice. It’s made from konjac flour and water, and it comes packed in liquid in a sealed bag. It is not cauliflower rice, which is cauliflower chopped small. They’re different products, and this soup was made with Miracle Rice, but cauliflower rice works too. There’s more on swapping it in below, and the Nutrition Facts panel has a column for it.

Rinse it thoroughly before it goes anywhere near the pot. Cut open the bag over a strainer, throw the liquid away, and rinse the rice under cool water for about a minute, as Miracle Noodle’s directions say. Please don’t skip this and tip the bag straight into your soup: that packing liquid is meant to be discarded, and if it goes in unrinsed, it will make your food taste very fishy. The same directions suggest drying the rinsed rice in a dry pan afterward, but this soup skips that step, because the rice goes straight into the simmering broth for the last 5 minutes, which is enough time to heat it through.

Don’t expect it to behave like regular rice, though. It’s already fully hydrated, so it won’t swell the way uncooked rice does, and with almost no starch it won’t thicken the broth. What it does give you is the look of rice in every spoonful, like a stuffed pepper filling.

As for the texture, I use Miracle Rice in place of cauliflower rice a lot, and in a soup I honestly barely notice it. With the beef, the peppers and the tomato all in there, it just blends in.

Serving It

The mozzarella is the last thing to go on. It gets sprinkled over the whole pot, the way cheese ends up melted on top of a stuffed pepper, and left to melt before you ladle it out. You can skip it, but the Nutrition Facts panel counts the cheese, so the numbers will change.

The soup in the photos also has chopped parsley scattered over it, which adds some fresh green against the tomato and isn’t counted in the panel.

Like our keto lasagna soup, this is a tomato-based soup that takes a familiar dish apart and puts it in a bowl. If you’d rather have something creamy, our creamy keto white chicken chili goes the other direction. And for something to dip into the broth, try our low-carb Italian garlic breadsticks.

Storing Leftovers

Get leftovers into the refrigerator within two hours of cooking. Kept covered, they’ll be good for three to four days, which is the USDA window for cooked leftovers. Reheat a portion on the stove until it comes to a boil, which is how the USDA says to reheat soups.

We haven’t tested freezing this one, so we can’t tell you how the shirataki rice holds up once it’s thawed.

If you make it, tell us in the comments whether you went with red and green peppers or swapped in another color.