Empanada Lesson

Every so often, my family and I (mostly my mom and I) get together with my aunt to learn a new recipe. We take turns bringing something to share. One time my brother and mom taught my aunt how to make onion rings. She's taught us how to make alfajores (a popular Argentina cookie). This last time we got together, we learned how to make empanada dough. I also taught her how to make a batch of bread from the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book (speaking of this book, I made a King Cake the other day and I'll post photos soon). It was a long day of cooking and dough.

We came with all of our ingredients to make the dough and our filling. Our filling consisted of shredded pork with green chilies. It was very good. My aunt had a ground/shredded beef filling. I'm not sure what exactly was in her filling. The traditional Mendoza style filling has ground beef, green olives, and hard boiled eggs. You really can fill the empanadas with anything you want. Vegetables, fruit, and meat of all kinds make great fillings.

The photos are of my aunt making her empanadas. I didn't think to get the camera out until we were finished with ours.

Our dough was a bit thin after it was all rolled out and cut into circle so it was a bit hard to work with. Next time we will keep them a little thicker.

Filling the dough

Closing the empanada

Here's the hard part. Folding the edges. There's a special technique to folding them. I didn't quite get it figured out. I need a bit more work on the folding. I did manage to make a few that looked decent.

Here's the finished empanada. Isn't it pretty.

Here is our completed (unbaked) empanadas. Don't look too close. Some of them are a bit scary. We did eat most of the mangled looking ones that night. And they tasted good.



And here is the final product. This one contained potatoes, hard boiled egg, and pork.