Greek Style Beef Stuffed Onions – The Ultimate Comfort Food

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Today we’re making Greek-Style Stuffed Onions. I hope you enjoy it!

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****PRINT RECIPES WITH INSTRUCTIONS AND PROCESS SHOTS****

Greek Stuffed Onions

BASE INGREDIENTS
▢6 large onions
FILLING
4 tablespoons (60ml) extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion – finely diced
5 cloves garlic – minced
1 1/2 pounds (680g) ground chuck
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 14-ounce can crushed plum tomatoes
1 cup (200g) arborio rice – rinsed until water runs clear
1/4 cup minced flat-leaf Italian parsley
1/4 packed cup fresh mint – chopped
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1/2 cup (75g) crumbled feta cheese
SAUCE
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
3 cups (720ml) saved onion broth
1 cup (200g) boiled onion centers – finely diced
salt and pepper – to taste

VIDEO EDITOR:
Billy Mark: @bluecrestproductions

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Today we’re going to make a new family favorite. It is called Greek stuffed onions. I know you’re going to love this one. Okay, these are all the ingredients that we need. I have six large onions. These onions are going to be used for stuffing. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to prep them in a sec. I’ll show you how to do it, but we’re going to just take a piece of them and almost make like a stuffed shell shape for the stuff Greek stuffed onions, which you could see clearly in the thumbnail how they look. It probably attracted your attention. 1 and 12 pounds of ground chuck. You can also use sirloin if you like. So if you want something on the leaner side, you could even do this recipe with ground turkey if you like. Another onion. This is another large onion that I just that I just diced. That’s going to be for the filling along with the beef. We have one cup of arboral rice. I just rinsed it until the water runs clear. I have 1/4 cup of Italian flat leaf parsley. I have 1/4 cup of mint that I just roughly chopped. I have a half a cup of feta cheese. I have five cloves of garlic that are minced. 2 tsp of dried Greek oregano. 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt. Not diamond crystal kosher, just fine t fine sea salt. 1 teaspoon. Half a teaspoon of black pepper. And then 14 oz of crushed tomatoes and a 6 oz can of tomato paste. Tomato paste is going to be used at the end for our brazing liquid, which is going to be the liquid that we cook the onions in. It’s essentially going to make an onion water. So, right now, you can first thing you can do is get a pot of water to boil. I already have it going. And then we’re going to prep these onions. It will make sense after, but if you can find more ovalish onions, which I was not able to find, it will be easier for when you stuff them. All right. We’re just going to take the onion and then we’re just going to cut off both ends. You could cut off even a little bit more than that. Okay. All right. So, that’s why you want to start with really big onions and just peel the outer part off. Sometimes an onion will need like you’ll have to peel two layers of it if there’s a little too much yellow in there. We’ll see right now. See? So, like we got to peel this other layer here first before we use it. We can’t use that part. Just be careful when you do it. initially, but it doesn’t really matter because you you’re going to see in a sec. I’m going to cut through it through half of it. Now, you see how there’s a hole here in the middle. Okay, the middle. It’s probably better to do it from this side. See the direct center of the onion? So, don’t cut all the way through. Just cut like this and like this. So, now what’s going to happen after we boil them, we’re going to be able to peel these big layers. Ovals are better because then you have the big longer part and you’re just cutting off the ends and then you’re kind of left with more. If you don’t take off enough at the end, it’s a little harder to peel them, but and you’re going to cry. You’re really going to cry in this one. And actually, it’s easier not even to peel initially because you’re going to have to go through it anyway. So, you could just do your cut. Okay. And now it’s much easier. You could just come ahead and peel it. I don’t know why I didn’t show you that initially. That’s definitely an easier way to do it. So, if you like main course recipes, which I’m sure you do because you’re watching this video, I want to let you know about our new cookbook, Sip and Feast Family Favorites. It has plenty of main courses in there. In addition to that, it has all the other sections you would expect to find in a cookbook. It is a beautiful cookbook, 256 pages, over 100 recipes, beautiful photo, nice instructions, good story in every single recipe. It has US customary and metric measurements, so everybody will be able to follow along with these easy recipes. Right above you is the link where you can buy it. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other sellers. QR code if you’re watching on TV, which I’m increasingly aware that the majority of you are watching on TV. It’s also pinned in the comments and in the description. If you don’t like cookbooks, you just like watching our videos, buy it for a friend or family who does. Thanks. Okay, our water is boiling now. Don’t fill up it all the way up because these onions are going to take up a lot of room. I might even have to take some water out of there. Okay, salted water just like pasta. This is going to We’re going to need this water after we do these onions for our onion broth. Okay, you can just drop them in like that if you don’t want to, you know, if you want put your hand in like that. But we’re going to see if we have enough room. We We do. So, the onions I used last time when I made this recipe for the print recipe. By the way, if you’re not printing our recipes, when you’re making these videos, you’re making it hard for yourself. All you have to do, go to our website, print the recipe, then you can follow along, so you don’t have to keep, you know, going back and forth in the video. But in that print recipe, the onions I had were much larger. When I went and got these yesterday, these were the biggest ones they had. All right, so you don’t even need to do this at a rip roaring boil. You can do it at like about medium high. And we just want to get these onions till they’re soft enough to like we’re softening them. They’re going to peel easily and they’re going to be pliable enough for when we stuff them. So essentially again, we’re making like a stuffed shell. We’re going to let these go for about 12 to 15 minutes. Okay. So I’m going to let the onions go on my stove over there. Many of you ask if I have a stove. Yes, I do. I don’t just, you know, cook cook on this portable top, but I do that so I can communicate with you easily. All right. Right, I’m heating up a stainless steel pan, a 12-in stainless steel pan to medium heat, maybe a touch lower. And now we’re just going to do our stuffing so we can do two things at the same time. Once that time has elapsed and they’re nice and soft, they’re going to we’re going to have to let them drain and they’re going to have to drain a long time before we can handle them. Okay, so like 10 another 10 minutes or some or so. So that’s why I start this now. Okay, so I preheated that up and just about a coat the bottom amount of oil, maybe 3 4 tablespoons. So this is we’re doing a stuffing for a vegetable. And the same principle applies to peppers to anything you want to stuff. You don’t even have to brown your beef. Many recipes, like old school good recipes, they’ll just take raw meat in there. So we can do the onions first and we don’t have to really worry about browning our meat. But because of the long cooking time, they take about an hour and a half in the oven. It doesn’t matter. You could just use raw meat. Little bit of salt. All right, we’re going to let these go for about 3 to 5 minutes until they get soft. Okay, so I’m going to put the garlic in. Just cook this for a minute till it gets nice and fragrant. And then we’ll just put the beef right in there, too. Almost every recipe that I do, if you’ve been watching this channel a long time, normally I’ll do the meat first to get it brown. But again, doesn’t matter much for this one. This is a little quicker this way, too. So, you don’t have to take the meat and remove it from the pan. when you’re doing like traditionally like Italian recipes, almost no recipe will have any color on the onions. Greek’s a little different. And then obviously other other cultures, other cuisines, some are, you know, brown in the onions a ton. So, but you can mix and match, you know, you can do what you like and it’s your own preference. All right, so I’m going to turn the heat up a little bit and I’ll just move these off to center for a second and then kind of like put them on top and we’ll put the meat in there. That’s 1 and 12 lbs of ground chuck. I do prefer using ground chuck for almost any type of recipe like this. If you’re healthy health conscious, you would want to use something a little bit leaner. That’s the bubbling how the onions are cooking about that level. Okay, so the onions have gone 12 minutes. I think they’re soft enough. I’m going to pull them off. Okay, I’ll just put them there for a sec and then I’m going to drain them right in a colander that I have in the sink. The beef it’s getting nice and browns. just left it on one side, but you don’t have to get it this brown if you don’t want to. You don’t you really don’t have to do it. Okay. And I’m just going to lower the heat now back to a little bit below medium. I’m just going to break this up. And you kind of break in the onions and garlic into into it, too. I’m just using this meat masher that I always use. It’s an $8 tool. I don’t know if there’s a heavy duty version you can buy. This is a Farberware one. But try to break up the meat pretty well so we can get an even distribution in our stuffing. And you know, you could twist if you want, but I just kind of just go up and down on it. Oh, I think I turned my heat down a little too much. Go back to about medium. So, it’s still a little pink. It’s fine. You could already move on to the next step. Okay. Salt and pepper. Okay. That’s one teaspoon of fine sea salt and a half a teaspoon of black pepper. Okay. We just season the beef somewhat. Now, we’re also putting in feta, so that’s salty. But, we want this seasoning to be very flavorful. And don’t worry, we’re going to taste test it before we stuff any onion to make sure. Okay, there’s a 14 oz can of of crushed tomatoes. I did it for expediency for this video, but you’re better off buying full 28 oz cans. They’re cheaper. Definitely cheaper. This is very thick, this crushed tomato from uh Cento. Okay, I’m going to put a little bit of water in here to wash that out just to clean the can out. There we go. All right, so I could have used a little bit bigger pan, but I think we’ll be able to fit everything. Let’s cook this tomato in here for about 5 minutes. Let this simmer to thicken a little bit. When you take your onions out, make sure that you save all of the onion water. See some of them. See how they opened up like this? I don’t know if you can see all the way back here, but this is like opening up a little bit. It’s fine. Put them Oops. See, I broke one there. This is why you need to have six of them because you’re going to have some breakage ones and a lot of the smaller ones you’re not going to really be able to use. You can even run a little cold water over that to cool them down quicker. All right, that’s pretty good. There’s a lot of fat from the beef in here, which is good. Okay, you can turn the heat off. Can mix the rice in. That is This is one cup of aroreio rice. But really, you can use any rice wh You can use any rice in this one. Wow, things are going really well today, I’ll tell you. So, let’s just mix this in there. Okay, I’m going to take this off the burner. Okay, and just combine everything. Again, bigger pan would have been better here. Two teaspoons of dried Greek oregano, but you can use regular oregano, too, if you want. 1/4 cup minced parsley, 1/4 cup of mint from my garden, and half a cup of feta cheese. Okay, this is cheese is like going to melt in here. So, let’s just mix everything together. So, when I initially made this recipe, I didn’t use feta and then I made it again and it was infinitely better with the feta. It needed like that bite. Now, if you don’t want to put that in there, you could use something like dry white wine in the sauce or maybe a little bit of lemon, but I thought the feta really made it way better. And honestly, you could use more than I’m using here. Okay, so I just pulled these off like this just to cool a little bit more. We’ll just leave these off to the side. Let’s taste this. Don’t worry about the rice. It’s not being cooked yet. Let’s taste for flavor. Okay, perfect. Doesn’t need more salt. Maybe a touch more pepper. But I’m going to call that good. So, we’re just going to leave this off to the side. We’ll let our onions cool for a second more. So, I took a little bit more than the three cups of the onion water. I probably have like four here. It’s fine. You just need enough liquid, close to enough liquid to cover the onions. Okay. Mix in the one can of tomato paste. And you can just like whisk it together or just use one of these. [Applause] Okay, so now we have an onion onion tomato water. There is one ingredient I forgot that has to go in here. We want to put a cup of the onion centers because the centers of these onions we don’t need. So I’m going to pull off some of them. There’s that’s just pulling from the center of it. Here’s another big piece. That’s fine. And blend this up, too. I knew I needed this for more than just doing the tomato and water. And you can chop these ahead of time to make it a little easier, but they’re soft enough that you’ll be able to blend them. And if you don’t have one of these immersion blenders, just use a regular blender. Okay. So, taste your onion water. Make sure it’s all blended. Okay. I’m going a little bit of salt, pepper. Mix it up again. Taste it one more time. Get it perfect. Okay. So, you’re going to have plenty of leftover onions here, pieces. Uh you can just save them and then you can use them for another recipe. That’s that’s what I would do. So, like here’s one that like kind of ripped, but we might be able to stuff it still. Same thing for this one. Okay. And I’m just going to put my pieces off to the side. I’ll just work from my left to my right. And I would go for like three or four per onion. So, they’re going to roll up like this when we stuff them. Sometimes the outermost one will just be too soft or not thick enough. Yeah. So, I’m just going to pull that one off. Trick is to boil them enough that you can do this, but not too much that they’re too hard to work with. This is all the onions that I have. Now, I want to say like some of the big ones, some of the outer layers, they’re not the best. They’re like a little I think you can see that one. And then versus this one. So, this is more towards the interior, maybe five layers in. Now, the really far interior besides the spot like the little the most inside of the onion that we used for our onion broth. These are still good enough. I mean, they’re really nice. So, you can do like keep these smaller ones and they’ll just take a little less stuffing and maybe do them in a second baking dish. I have a 9 by13 baking dish and we’re probably not going to be able to fit them all. And depending on how many onions you used, you might have a little bit of stuffing. If you have an extra pepper, you could throw this stuffing in a pepper and just cook it for the same amount of time and that will be delicious, too. and it’s an easy way to use up all that stuffing. Okay, so we’re just going to grab an onion. Okay, an onion. One of our layers like so. And we’re just going to put in about 1 to 2 tablespoon of the stuffing. Okay, about that much. Just roll it like this and then it will enclose like so. And then just put it in your baking dish seamside down. Rinse and repeat for all of them. And it’s not too difficult. It’s actually a good thing to have your kids or a family member help you with. I like to get them fairly tight in the dish so they’re all kind of like compact so not too much stuffing will fall out. Any one that’s really long, you sometimes the really biggest pieces you can separate into two. So I’m going try to find a real big one. Okay. See how big this is. Okay. You could probably turn that into two or it’ll just be more onion for the person. Choice is yours. Let’s do the rest. And I don’t know if I mentioned it. 375° Fahrenheit oven. Okay, that’s where we’re going to cook these at. So, the little ones, the littleer ones I stuffed, I put in the little plate here. So, that could almost be like an appetizer. And then these are the larger ones. I would say like three or four per person. I mean, when I when we make this, I have like six or more cuz I love them. Seamside down on all of them, you know, and a little bit will leak out, but that’s okay. And then the amount of stuffing I had left is this. So that’ll probably do about a half a pepper. May maybe a whole small pepper. And then those are the pieces I had left. Just four. All right. So you can kind of gauge from that like based on the size of the onion I used uh how much you’re going to have. But you know, for anything stuffing like this, it’s always, you know, there’s always a little bit of leftover stuff. I’m just going to put the broth. Just pour it in there. Okay. And I want to get it like almost covering them. Okay, about that much. I’ll do this one. Now, the recipe says three cups. I used four here. So, you can see how you’re going to have a little bit extra if you only use one baking dish. We’re going to bake these for 1 hour at 375 Fahrenheit. After 1 hour, we’ll check on them. Uh, make sure your foil’s very tight. Check on them after an hour. And then, you know, depending on how they are, you can let them go for another half an hour uncovered. But you can make that decision at after the hour point based on how much evaporation you got and based on how soft those onions were initially uh when when we pre- boiled them. Okay, so that’s been an hour. Okay, there you go. That’s how they look. So now we’re going to put them back in the oven for 30 minutes or until everything evaporates more and the sauce kind of starts to thicken a little bit. What I like to do is at the end I will broil for just a touch because these are onions. They’re once that broiler hits them, they’re going to burn quickly, but I do like to put a little bit of color on them. But get them back in the oven for 30 minutes. And it’s your choice if you want to heat up the broiler. Even if you don’t, they’re still super delicious. We just want that liquid to go down. Okay, here they are. Stuffed onions. So now the liquid I probably if I left them in for another 20 minutes, it would be more absorbed. You can let it like basically go down to nothing and get very sticky on there. But this is pretty good. I put a broil on these things for like a few seconds and you can see like Yeah, that’s why you have to be so careful. But it looks nice. And then this one I didn’t even do because this one this is this is actually this one looks more like how you would like it. See how like it’s much thicker in there. I’m going to uh pull these out and uh have the taste tester. We’ll see what the taste tester thinks. James, what are you sponsoring today? Greenport Harbor Brewing Company. Yep. All right. Got a few years before uh before you can go there. Not sure if I like it that much, honestly. All right. Can I guess you don’t like mint? Is it the mint? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. Just listen. If you don’t like mint either, back off on the mint. I like mint, but like it’s too much in this. Back it off. It’s like I was expecting something different. Like I kind of want to be like more just like beefy and like less minty. Okay, I’m going to test. And I don’t think the mint goes that well with the onion. Just being honest. Well, I mean, James, it is traditional in a lot of these recipes. Well, traditional isn’t always the best thing. That’s true. That is true. You’re going to be like, “Oh, it’s so good now. Oh, it’s so good.” And this is important for people who they want to hear your opinion. They might be like, “Oh, yeah. I totally agree with him. I don’t like I don’t like mint.” It’s like when you look at it and then you taste it, you don’t expect it to taste like that. Most of the Greek stuffed onions will have a mint component. Many Greek recipes will have mint in it, too. And and ital, you know, southern Italian, you know, Sicilian recipes. I’m not a big I’m not a big fan of this. Okay, that’s okay. Give you give your honest rating for people. I’m going to give this like a six. Okay. Listen, I this it’s not in the cookbook. Okay. And no, I I love these. I do. And it’s again, there’s a taste difference here in the family. I wouldn’t have done a video for this if they weren’t a hit with Tara and Sammy like these, too. Right. I think so. Yeah. We have a daughter. Also, I’m not even going to go in the other room and eat this. All right. You don’t have to, James. You don’t have to pile on here. Okay. Like, actually, I think people have been waiting for this. It’s been a while. You know, I don’t think there’s anything more to add here. Uh, not in the cookbook. Buy our cookbook. And yeah, the stuff in the cookbook. If you don’t like mint, don’t don’t add the mint. Yeah, don’t add the mint if you don’t like mint. It doesn’t even need basil. It’s It would be fine with just the parsley. Yeah. Or maybe a little dill. He James is definitely a a great taste tester. And I think many people like with the best pallets in the world probably I like won’t like wouldn’t like mint either. I like mint, but like I just don’t think it tastes good with the onions like and the beef. Like it just doesn’t like go together well. Like Well, thanks James. We appreciate your ratings. We appreciate you watching and we will see you next time. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.