AI photoVegetarian Pepper and Lentil Stew
A hearty vegetarian stew of mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes and lentils, served with rice.
Labels are worked out automatically from the ingredients and can be wrong. Check the packaging if it matters to you.
Ingredients
- 250 g Mushrooms sliced
- 3 pcs Onion finely chopped
- 200 g Carrot diced
- 2 pcs Bell pepper diced
- 50 g Sun-dried tomatoes finely chopped
- 2 tbsp Paprika
- 1 tsp Smoked paprika
- 200 ml Vegetable stock
- 400 g Canned chopped tomatoes
- 25 g Tomato paste
- 150 g Black beluga lentils
- 50 g Red lentils
- 250 ml Double cream
- 2 tbsp Olive oil for frying
- Salt
- Black pepper freshly ground
- 300 ml Basmati rice cooked according to packet instructions
- 1 bunch Parsley finely chopped
Steps
Heat the oil in a pot and fry the mushrooms over medium heat until golden brown.
Add the onion and carrot and cook until the onion softens.
Add the bell pepper, sun-dried tomatoes, paprika, smoked paprika, vegetable stock, chopped tomatoes, tomato paste, beluga lentils, red lentils and double cream.
Bring to the boil, stirring.
Cover and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Cook for 30 minutes, until the lentils are tender.
30 minServe with the rice, sprinkled with parsley.
This is a stew built on two lentils doing two different jobs, and that's the whole trick of it. The red lentils have no skin to speak of — they collapse into the sauce within minutes, thickening it from the inside, so you're not relying on flour or endless reduction to get body. The black beluga lentils keep their shape almost to the end and give you something to actually bite into, little glossy beads that look a bit like caviar, which is where the name comes from. Lose either one and you get a different dish: all red lentils and you have a thick soup with nothing to chew; all beluga and the sauce stays thin and watery, however long you cook it.
What decides whether this works is the order of the fry. Mushrooms go in first, alone, in a wide pan with room to breathe — because mushrooms are mostly water, and water in a crowded pan means they steam in their own sweat instead of browning. You want them turning deep gold before anything else goes near them. Only then the onion and carrot, because onion releases its own moisture too and would have stopped the mushrooms colouring if it went in alongside them. This is the one place in the whole recipe where "until golden" matters more than any clock — a timer tells you roughly, your eyes tell you exactly.
On the mushrooms: sliced, not diced, because you want surface area for browning, not little cubes that just go soft and disappear. Any firm cultivated mushroom works — chestnut, button, even a mix with something dried-and-rehydrated if you want more flavour, since dried mushrooms concentrate what fresh ones dilute with water. What you're avoiding by frying them hard and early is a grey, slippery texture in the finished stew — mushrooms that never browned just turn to rubber once they've spent half an hour simmering in liquid.
The two paprikas aren't interchangeable, and this is where a myth is worth naming: some think smoked paprika is just "stronger" paprika, so you can use more of the sweet kind and get there. You can't — smoked paprika's flavour comes from the peppers being dried over wood smoke before grinding, an actual process, not an intensity dial. The sweet paprika gives colour and a mild sweetness in bulk; the smoked gives you the one note that reads as "slow-cooked over fire" in a dish that's actually done on a hob in half an hour. If you've only got one, use the smoked and less of it — the illusion matters more than the quantity.
Sun-dried tomatoes and tomato paste are both doing concentration work, giving you tomato flavour without tomato water, which the canned chopped tomatoes already supply plenty of. If you're out of sun-dried, a splash of balsamic or even a spoon of marmite sounds odd but gives a similar hit of concentrated savoury-sweet — not the same flavour, but the same job in the dish.
Vegetable stock: use a cube or paste you trust, or just save the water from boiling vegetables for your Sunday roast — it's free, and no worse than most shop stock for a dish this heavily seasoned already with paprika and tomato.
Double cream at the end isn't optional richness you could skip to make it "lighter" — without it the lentils and tomato alone give you something closer to a thin dal, sharp rather than rounded. If you want to cut it, a full-fat coconut milk does something similar, though it pulls the flavour toward a different country entirely, which may or may not bother you.
The rice is cooked separately and kept apart until serving on purpose — rice stirred into a wet stew turns to porridge within the hour, because it keeps absorbing liquid after it's "done". Keep them in separate pots until the plate, and the texture of each stays intact. Parsley at the end is the only fresh, uncooked thing in the whole dish — it's there to cut through all that cream and paprika with something that still tastes alive, so don't chop it so early it wilts waiting its turn. This feeds four as a main, more as a side alongside something else on the table — there's enough body in it that nobody will ask where the meat went.