After looking through so many recipes, I sorta ran out of steam when trying to find a third Spanish recipe. Luckily, one of my colleagues mentioned empanadas! I needed to find something pretty easy, and Serious Eats wasn’t floating my boat this time around. But the internet never fails to provide options…
Beef Empanadas
Ingredients
- 1 egg
- 1 lb ground sirloin
- 1/4 c diced onion
- 1/2 medium diced bell pepper (any color)
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1 tsp minced garlic
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp pepper
- 1 package of pre-made pie crust (2 rolls)*
- 1 c Mexican blended cheese
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Prepare cookie sheet with parchment paper. Set aside. In a small bowl, beat the egg lightly. Set aside
- In a large skillet, brown ground beef, onions and bell pepper until beef is cooked through, onions are translucent, and peppers are soft, then drain excess fat. Add spices and cook for 2 minutes. Remove from heat.
- Roll out pie crusts. Using a 4-5 inch diameter bowl, trace and cut circles. Re-roll crust, and repeat tracing and cutting circles. Depending on size of bowl, you can get 6-8 circles total. Transfer dough circles to the prepared baking sheet.
- Place 2-3 Tbsp of meat filling in the middle of each circle, and top with 1 Tbsp cheese (each). Fold circle in half, keeping the filling inside. Press edge down and seal with a fork (if necessary, dip the tip of a finger in a bowl of water, and run your finger around the edge of the circle.
- Brush beaten egg on top of each closed empanada. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the tops are golden.
Full confession (and a bit of an aside) – I have difficulties with pastry.
I’ve tried making puff pastry multiple times. The making of the puff pastry isn’t terribly difficult, and I’m getting the hang of it. But the process of actually using pastry is where I’ve been falling down. With puff pastry, I’ve tried making cherry turnovers, but I consistently fail to end up with anything other than cherry tacos…
I’m well aware that the reason is probably due to not rolling the pastry thin enough.
Why am I sharing this if the empanada recipe doesn’t use puff pastry? Because I couldn’t find the pre-made pie crust rolls, and had to resort to getting two pre-formed pie crusts (Marie Calendar). This meant removing the crusts from their metal plates, and rolling them out. This did not work the way I had intended – the crusts were made of a dough that was relatively dry, and so they cracked pretty severely.
I resorted to forming the dough into a ball and rolling it out – you can see where my issues with rolling pasty out thin enough now come into play. Perhaps I should have done more research into how thin the packaged rolls of pie crust would have been…
Regardless of the issues that I had with the dough, or the fact that for some reason I felt rushed to fill the dough circles and seal them (there was no need to hurry – not sure what I was thinking there), they turned out really tasty! We’ll definitely try these again!
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