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

My dad has a Greek dish for any occasion and season.

His youvetsi is perfect when you need a quick pasta dish, and his pastitsio is like the Greek version of lasagna — but better. His avgolemono soup is the ultimate sick day cure, and his baklava is still my favorite dessert.

When the summer tomato season is in full swing, my dad loves whipping up yemista. It’s light, healthy, and comforting — and I always request it whenever I visit my parents.

Here’s how to make it.

Yemista was one of the many Greek dishes I grew up with.

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 and 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 whipping up the dishes they grew up with for my sister and me. 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 perfect for a summer dinner.

My dad’s yemista only needs a few simple ingredients.

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 they are in Greece — and thus trickier to cook evenly with the tomatoes.

He often just makes yemista with tomatoes now, but the process to cook tomatoes and peppers is the same. Feel free to follow these instructions and try both together if you desire!

We begin by chopping the onion and parsley.

This will be for our yemista filling.

Then, it’s time to prepare the tomatoes.

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

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

Scoop the filling out of each tomato.

You’ll want to scoop out the core and flesh of the tomato, leaving enough space to add the yemista filling later (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 a pasta dish.

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.

There are two methods you can use to make the tomato “sauce” that goes into the yemista filling. The easier one involves a food processor.

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.

If you don’t have a food processor, you can achieve similar results with a grater.

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 just need the soft part of each tomato.

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

Your finished tomato “sauce” should look like this.

Leave it to the side until it’s time to make the filling.

Arrange your tomato “cups” in a 9-inch by 12-inch baking dish.

Dump any extra water from the tomato cups right into the baking dish. (Don’t worry, we’re going to add even more water in a bit.)

Lightly salt the interior of each tomato for extra taste.

Our yemista is almost ready for the oven.

Now it’s time to make the filling.

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

Let the olive oil heat up, then add the chopped onion.

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

Now, throw in the ground beef …

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

… and some chopped parsley.

Only use half of the parsley you’ve prepped.

Then, mix everything together.

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

Once the meat has browned, add the rice and tomato “sauce.”

Remember you’ll need ⅔ cup of rice.

Mix everything together and let it simmer.

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.

Throw in the rest of the chopped parsley.

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

Using a spoon, fill each tomato cup with the beef and rice mixture.

Make sure you don’t overfill because the rice will expand in the oven.

Your filled tomato cups should look like this.

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. But if you have extra tomatoes, you can always scoop and fill them with the extra stuffing.

Alternatively, just adjust your recipe the next time by using less ground beef.

Then, put the tops back on the tomatoes and add some water and olive oil.

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

It’s time to bake the yemista.

Place the baking dish in the middle rack of your oven, which should be set at 360 degrees Fahrenheit.

It takes around one hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half to cook the yemista, depending on the oven. You’ll want to check on them around the 45-minute mark.

My dad has a quick trick to see if the yemista is ready.

Scoop just 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 time.

After taking your yemista out of the oven, let it sit for five to 10 minutes.

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

The yemista is ready! And there are so many ways to enjoy it.

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.

You can find the recipe for my dad’s classic Greek roasted potatoes here.

Yemista is terrific all year round, but it’s especially delicious in the summer.

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. 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.

I also love how yemista is both light and filling. 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.

It’s also super easy to make and always a crowd-pleaser. My best friend Nausheen would always request it when she came over for dinner while we were in high school (and 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’s given me through the decades. As the Greeks would say, kali orexi!

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