Portuguese Tomato Rice With Cabbage and Cheese Stuffed Dumplings

Turning classic flavours into lunchtime flavour bombs

Oct 18, 2023

Back when I was learning how to cook in my twenties, I believed that dishes could only be delicious if they were extremely complicated.

One of my go-tos back then was a Caribbean-inspired beef stew with eight spices, three different types of pumpkin, coconut milk, dumplings, and marinated beef. It took around four hours to cook.

It was only once I started to work in wine that I appreciated the beauty of good quality simplicity. In the complexity department, a well-made single-varietal wine like Northern Rhône Syrah is going to knock the socks off a poorly-made blend.

The same goes for food.

This is my roundabout way of introducing one of the most simple dishes of all.

Portuguese tomato rice.

Before I ate tomato rice, I worried it would be bland until I had the pleasure of eating it at Nuno Mendes’ Cozhina das Flores restaurant in Porto. Nuno might not be well-known in the US, but in the UK he’s famous for elevating Portuguese cuisine to more than the sum of its simple parts.

Of course, it all comes down to quality. Decent squishy late summer / early autumn tomatoes make this dish. Good quality rice, olive oil and garlic too. Under Nuno’s hands, this wasn’t a boring side dish, it was the thing I couldn’t stop eating.

The Portuguese love their rice to be a little brothy — never dry — which adds an extra element of texture to the final dish. With that sauce, it feels less like a side dish and more like a stew.

As an aside, in Portuguese, this type of soupy rice is called malandrinho which Google translated as naughty. For weeks I couldn’t understand why the hell you would call rice naughty until I saw another translation.

It means saucy.

Saucy rice = naughty rice.

I freaking love this country.

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After eating at Nuno’s place I was inspired to do what he does so well — take Portuguese ingredients and recipes and re-imagine them as something else.

I had an idea that I wanted to make a rissol — the croquette-style dumplings you find in every traditional restaurant in Porto. But I didn’t have all the ingredients for classic rissois and this is The Capsule Pantry —we’re all about adapting recipes to what you already have to hand.

So I settled on making dough-based dumplings similar to my Chinese potstickers, but filled with Portuguese ingredients. Garlic. Lemon. Coriander. Shredded cabbage. Fresh cheese. Almonds.

I topped the rice with them and hey presto, a new re-imagined, Portuguese-inspired dish was born.

The dumplings are easy to make but slightly time consuming so if you’re strapped in that department, you can buy ready made dumplings. Polish pierogi would be my go-to because the flavours will complement. But you do you — if you’ve got a hankering for Chinese flavours then hey, make them and call it fusion.

I’ve included plenty of dumpling filling ideas in the variation section below.

Portuguese Tomato Rice With Vegetable and Cheese Stuffed Dumplings

Serves 4

The rice

1 cup of rice (see Variations section for notes on rice varieties to use)
3 times the volume of stock to rice (use chicken or vegetable, or water if you don’t have any) = 3 cups
1/2 a large (or one small) white onion, finely chopped
3 large garlic cloves finely chopped
2 large, ripe tomatoes chopped into small chunks
1/2 red bell pepper chopped into small chunks (optional)
Parsley or coriander, finely chopped
Olive oil and sea salt

Heat a glug of olive oil in a saucepan. Gently fry the onions and bell peppers over a medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and stir for another minute or two.

Add the tomatoes and simmer for 5-10 minutes or until the tomatoes have broken down into a thick, chunky sauce.

Pour in the stock, tip in the rice and season with sea salt. Cook for around 12-15 minutes, stirring every few minutes until the rice is cooked. If the rice isn’t yet done but has soaked up all the stock, add a splash of water. Don’t forget, you want your rice to be saucy (or indeed, naughty).

Stir in the coriander or parsley at the last minute. Serve with the dumplings:

The dumplings

1 quantity of dumpling wrappers
Finely chopped vegetables. I used cabbage and celery and eyeballed how much I would need for the filling (it was around 1 cup once chopped)
A small handful of coriander finely chopped
1 large garlic clove finely chopped
The juice of around half a small lemon
2-3tbsp fresh cheese
7-8 blanched almonds finely chopped
Salt and pepper to season

Make your dumpling wrappers as per the recipe here.

Mix the rest of the ingredients together.

Fill each wrapper with a teaspoon of the filling then fold over into a half moon, sealing the edges. Bring the bottom points of the half moon together and pinch in a tortellini shape.

Fry the dumplings in a little oil in a non-stick frying pan for a few minutes until they’re crispy and golden on the bottom. CAREFULLY (it’ll spit) add a splash of water into the pan, turn the heat down slightly and put a lid on to steam the dumplings. This will take around 6-7 minutes.

Top the rice with the dumplings, drizzle over a little good quality extra virgin olive oil and serve.

Dietary requirements

Make the dumplings vegan by omitting the cheese.

Make them gluten free by swapping flour-based dumpling wrappers for rice flour (unless you’re used to cooking with rice flour, these are best store-bought).

Make the dumplings nut-free by omitting the almonds or swapping them for seeds like pumpkin.

Change up your dumpling fillings

Dumpling fillings are endless which is why I love them. If you want to keep along the Portuguese line, you could swap the cabbage for minced pork. You could also look at leftover roasted chicken, minced beef, or a mix of different vegetables from zucchini to carrot.

Experiment with different fresh cheeses like feta, ricotta, or soft goat’s cheese.

Not an almond fan? Walnuts or hazelnuts would work great too, as would omitting the nuts if you don’t have any to hand.

Other toppings for tomato rice

In Portugal, tomato rice is usually served with grilled whole fish. You could also top it with seafood like langoustines, shrimp, lobster, squid, or steamed clams or mussels.

A pan-fried pork chop would be a wonderful thing here.

Add a fried or poached egg.

Or do what I sometimes do and eat it right out of the pan, no acoutrement needed.

A note on rice varieties

The original rice used here in Portugal is Carolino which is a short-grained variety, similar to Italian Arborio, but a little less starchy.

But the beauty of a simple, born-out-of-poverty dish like this is you can (and should) use what you have to hand. Personally, I used Basmati because that’s what I had in my pantry. You could use Arborio, Bomba, long grain, or Jasmine.

This recipe is designed for white rice, but you could use brown although it would take much longer to cook and require a lot more water.

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