Beef and Cheese Empanadas

Empanadas!

Have you had them before?  If not you're in for a treat.

Empanadas are stuffed pastries that are surprisingly common in Mexico.  Most restaurants and vendors will sell them fried, but we're going to bake them for a lighter version that will give you permission to make them more frequently.

And yes, the spicy beef mixture combined with some gooey cheese makes these empanadas total keepers, but the unsung hero of these empanadas is the dough.  A few simple tricks will ensure that you are always pulling out a tray full of tender, flaky empanadas.

It can be so discouraging to take a bite of a freshly baked empanada and instead of sheer delight your first reaction is...Wait, what happened?   They look good, they smell good, but why are they so dense and tough?

It turns out that pastry dough is a finicky bird and I've learned the hard way on that one.   Here's a summary of the mistakes I've made in past versions:

Disintegrating all the fat into the flour.  Kneading the dough as if it were bread dough.  Using warm ingredients instead of cold ingredients, i.e. cold butter and cold water.  Not chilling the dough before rolling it out because you're getting hungry.

In other words, you have total permission to leave the pastry dough unkept and scatterbrained as long as you are chilling it before use.

One other thing I want to mention before we build a batch.  You'll occasionally see empanadas made with lard, but when I tried that it didn't taste familiar to me.  I think I was trying to recreate some empanadas I would get from a restaurant in Cozumel, so eventually I started over with a butter-based dough version that is popular on Epicurious.  It's a good starting recipe to help get familiar with the basics of empanadas, so we'll be adapting that here today.  At some point I might go back to experimenting with lard as the cooking fat, but lately I just use the butter version because it's so rewarding.

Start by mixing 1.5 teaspoons of salt into 3 1/4 cups of flour.

Dice up 6 oz. of butter (1.5 sticks) into small 1/2" chunks and plop them into the flour.  Use your fingers to mix it in just enough to make the mixture crumbly with a few chunks of butter laying about.  No need to worry about disintegrating all of the butter into the flour, leave it a bit shaggy.

In a bowl, combine 2 small eggs, 1.5 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (or white vinegar), and 1/2 cup of ice cold water.  Add this mixture to the flour and use a fork or spatula to roughly combine.

Dump onto a work surface but resist the temptation to knead!  Just combine it enough to form a cohesive ball.

Admit it, you are tempted to knead that together 🙂

Cover with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least two hours.   You could also chill it overnight and use the next day.

This gives you plenty of time to work on the fillings.  We're using a fiery beef mixture that we also use in our Hardshell Beef Tacos (more on that recipe later).  It has real kick but you can always dial back on the chipotles if you want a milder version.

I'll put instructions for this in the recipe box below, but basically you are cooking off onion with the ground beef and adding garlic, chipotles, adobo sauce, chili powder, cumin, black pepper, and salt.   It has great flavor and is a natural fit for these empanadas.

For cheese we're using Monterey Jack, but Mozzarella is a good option too.  One thing to note about the cheese...  Cutting the cheese into chunks, as opposed to grating, will help the cheese flavor stand out more inside the piping hot empanadas.

Okay, your empanada dough is chilled and it's time to roll it out.   Large work surfaces where you can roll out half the dough at a time will work best, but rolling out 1/4 of the dough at a time on a big cutting board works too.  Give it a light sprinkling of flour and gently flatten the dough down to 1/4" or less using a rolling pin.

You've got quite a bit of leeway on the size of your empanadas.  You can use a biscuit cutter but I just grab whatever is laying around.   A four-inch diameter bowl will give you a medium-sized empanada with plenty of room for filling.

Add 1-2 Tablespoons of the beef mixture and plenty of cheese.

I find it easiest to pull up both sides of the dough and let gravity hold the fillings in place as you pinch the empanada shut using your fingers.

Then you can use the tip of a fork to seal the edges further.  This will ensure that you don't get any leaks while they bake.

This batch made about 16 medium-sized empanadas.

Brush them with some eggwash and bake in a 400F oven for 20-25 minutes or until they are golden brown.  This batch took the full 25 minutes.

Let cool for a couple minutes and then take a bite.  If you bypassed all of my mistakes then you are left with a tender, flaky empanada with incredible flavor.

Yum!

You can gobble these up as is or serve with a dipping sauce, with a special nod to your homemade Salsas.

Remember, the dough is the key!  Don't sweat it if your first encounter with empanada dough is a bit maddening, trust me I've been there.  Once you've got the basics of the dough down you'll quickly move onto thinking about the endless possibilities you've got to fill up these beauties.

Okay I'll put the recipe box for the Empanadas below if you want to make them.

And that wraps up the Appetizers Module!  You'll find the Module table down below with the corresponding Quiz.   Simply click on 'Appetizers -- Quiz!" to start the Quiz.  And don't forget to bring your appetizer skills!