Stuffed grape is basically a kind of dessert prepared by stuffing seedless red or green grapes with a sweet and slightly tangy filling made with cream cheese, lemon juice, and sugar. There are a couple of recipe variations of this dish, with one of them explained in terms of use of grapes as one of the stuffing ingredients for chicken breasts and the other one suggesting stuffing grape leaves with a savory filling of meat and rice.
Preparation Overview of Stuffed Grapes
The most popular stuffed grape recipe suggests the use of softened cream cheese, sugar, grated lemon peel, lemon juice, and seedless grapes as the ingredients.
All the ingredients, except grapes, are combined together and refrigerated for around an hour before using it as grape stuffing. A slit is created into the top of seedless and dried grapes in the form of deep “X”, and the prepared stuffing is transferred into the deep hole. The stuffed grapes are refrigerated before serving.
Due to small size of the grapes, it is difficult to spoonfill the stuffing; therefore the stuffing is transferred into a plastic bag, and then poured into the grapes after creating a small cut at the bag’s corner.
Stuffed Grape Recipe Variations
A couple of variations of stuffed grape, viz. grape leaves stuffed with a savory filling and grapes stuffed in chicken breasts, are described below:
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Roast chicken with grape and herb stuffing- the recipe for this dish suggests stuffing chicken with seedless grapes mix, which is filled in the pocket of chicken’s breasts. The stuffed chicken is then roasted after holding the skin’s flap with a small skewer. The stuffing used in this dish is prepared by sautéing onions in butter, and then combining them with seedless grapes, breadcrumbs, chopped parsley, crushed garlic, and tarragon. Alternatively the stuffing can be prepared by combining browned Italian sausage (pork based sausage) with sautéed mix of onions, chopped celery, seedless green grapes, and herb seasoned stuffing mix.
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Stuffed grape leaves- this is a popular Greek dish, the recipe for which suggests soaking the leaves of grapes in ice cold water for a couple of hours, before placing the beef and rice mix in the center of each leaf, which are then rolled in upward direction. The stuffed leaves are then cooked in a large sized pan filled with water after placing a weighty plate on the top of stuffed leaves, so as to keep the grape leaves in place during the process of cooking. The beef and rice mix used as the stuffing is prepared by combining together ground lean beef, uncooked white rice, tomato sauce, finely chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. It is important to keep in mind not to overstuff the grape leaves with rice and beef mix, so as to give some space to rice to expand. A recipe variant suggests substituting beef with lamb, and combining it along with allspice, cinnamon, rice, and parsley to prepare the stuffing for grape leaves.