My dad’s Greek stuffed tomatoes are perfect for a healthy summer dinner

The word yemista means “stuffed” in Greek. True to its name, the dish traditionally consists of tomatoes and bell peppers stuffed with rice and ground beef, then baked in the oven.

Yemista (also spelled gemista) was a weekly staple of my childhood. My parents immigrated to the US from Greece in the 1980s and loved making the dishes they grew up with. Their food helped me connect to my culture as a first-generation Greek American and instilled an early and enduring love for Mediterranean cooking.

My dad, an excellent home cook, has taught me how to make many classic Greek dishes. And he thinks his yemista is a perfect summer dinner.

To make yemista at home, you’ll need:

• 8 (relatively large) tomatoes
• 1 pound of ground beef
• ½ onion, chopped
• ⅔ cup of rice (we use the medium-grain Calrose rice)
• ¾ cup of parsley
• 1 clove of garlic

Although yemista is traditionally made with both tomatoes and bell peppers, my dad has found that bell peppers in the US are thicker than in Greece — and thus trickier to cook evenly with tomatoes.

Now he usually just makes yemista with tomatoes, but the process to cook peppers is the same. Feel free to follow these instructions and try both if you desire!

This will be for our yemista filling.

After washing your tomatoes, use a good knife and slice off the top of each one, including the stem.

Don’t throw the tops away! You’ll need them again before the tomatoes go into the oven.

You’ll want to scoop out the tomato’s core and flesh, leaving enough space to add the yemista filling (as seen above). My dad recommends using an ice cream scooper to get the filling out since it’s sharper, but a spoon will also work.

If you’re making eight stuffed tomatoes, save the flesh of five of them in a bowl — you’ll need them for the filling. My dad recommends using the leftover flesh to make a simple tomato sauce for pasta.

Pro tip: If you’re doing stuffed bell peppers as well, you’ll scoop them out the same way, just make sure to throw the seeds away.

Using a knife, remove the hard core from each small ball of tomato filling you’ve scooped out. Put the remaining flesh in a food processor to finely chop everything.

Carefully slide your ball of tomato filling up and down the grater over a bowl, removing the flesh from the core. Don’t try to grate the hard core — we only need the soft part of each tomato.

This can be a little trickier, especially for an inexperienced chef, so watch out for your fingers!

Set it aside until it’s time to make the filling.

Dump any extra water from the tomato cups right into the baking dish.

Our yemista is almost ready for the oven!

First, add a drizzle of olive oil to a large sauté pan over medium heat.

The onion should cook for a couple of minutes, until browned.

Season the beef with salt and freshly ground black pepper for extra flavor.

Only use half of the parsley you’ve prepped.

Use a spatula or wooden spoon to break up the ground beef, cooking it until the meat has browned.

Remember you’ll need ⅔ cup of rice.

This will take around five minutes, until most of the water in the sauce has reduced.

But don’t let the filling get too dry — we need some liquid to help the rice cook in the oven.

Give it one last mix, and voilà — your filling is done!

Remember, the rice will expand in the oven. Make sure you don’t overfill the cups.

Depending on the size of your tomatoes, you might have some extra filling. Unfortunately, since it contains raw rice, there’s not much you can do with it.

If you have extra tomatoes, you can always scoop them out and fill them with the extra stuffing, or adjust your recipe next time to use less ground beef.

You’ll want to add half a cup of water to the pan, along with a spoonful of olive oil. Both help prevent the tomato cups from sticking to the pan.

Place the baking dish on the middle rack of your oven, set to 360 degrees Fahrenheit.

It takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes to cook the yemista, depending on the oven. Check on them around the 45-minute mark.

Scoop a bit of the stuffing from a tomato and taste it to see if the rice is cooked. If it still tastes chewy or crispy, the yemista needs more baking time.

This helps the yemista cool and absorb all those delicious flavors you worked so hard on.

Season the stuffed tomatoes with some oregano and freshly cracked black pepper. You can also serve them topped with a yogurt-and-garlic sauce, just like my grandfather always loved.

To make the sauce, take one cup of Greek yogurt and add a minced clove of garlic. Mix everything together, then add a teaspoon or more on top of each stuffed tomato, depending on your preference.

Yemista also goes great with my dad’s Greek potatoes.

Yemista is perfect for the summer, when tomatoes are at their peak. I love the blistered texture of the roasted tomatoes, which are juicy and subtly sweet. The combination of the rice and beef is always comforting, but the dish is colorful and healthy — a hallmark of the Mediterranean diet beloved by Greeks.

When I was a kid and my parents made yemista with both tomatoes and peppers, I never ate the pepper shells but always asked for more tomatoes. And my best friend, Nausheen, would always request it whenever she came over for dinner in high school. She still talks about it to this day.

Whenever you decide to eat it, I hope my dad’s yemista brings you as much joy and comfort as it has given me through the decades.

As the Greeks would say, kali orexi!