Baked Beef Empanadas

Just a few weeks ago, we shared our Farewell Columbia homage to our food faves from our home for the past three-ish years. One of Ally’s favorite things to do in Columbia was to walk up and down the market, pretending like she might branch out, but then settle back on her favorite empanadas for brunch. Can’t blame her! We’ve been a little apprehensive to make empanadas at home for fear we won’t do them justice. But since we have time off between graduation and starting our new jobs, we’ve promised ourselves that we would attempt some of the more intimidating/time-consuming/difficult dishes that we’ve been too afraid to try! Fingers crossed 🤞🏽

A lot of time when we attempt a recipe from a cuisine that we didn’t grow up cooking (ie: most of them), we struggle to find the authentic recipe. We don’t want to misrepresent anything on here. In standard fashion, we spent a lot of time scouring the internet for the perfect empanada dough recipe. For a basic empanada dough for baking, it seems that the biggest controversy is whether or not to use an egg in the dough. We decided to try no egg dough today. We mostly leaned on one of Ally’s favorite sites, Global Table Adventure, for our dough recipe and inspiration for the empanadas themselves. Her video of repulgue-ing the dough edges was really helpful! While Sasha made empanadas for her Argentina meal, we didn’t add the more traditional Argentine ingredients (hard-boiled egg, olives) to ours tonight – we wanted to start our homemade empanada adventure with a basic recipe. We also consulted an article – Common Empanada Mistakes – for help too!

Baked Beef Empanadas

(Roughly adapted from Global Table Adventure)

Ingredients:

• Dough
  • 4 cups AP flour
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 16 tbsp (2 stick) cold butter
  • 1 – 1 1/2 cups cold water
• Filling
  • 1 tbsp neutral oil
  • 1 small onion, minced
  • 6 cloves garlic
  • 1 tbsp tomato paste
  • 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 tsp oregano
  • 2 tsp chili powder
  • 1/4 tsp cayenne (omit for those who can’t take the heat)
  • 2 tsp paprika
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 10 turns fresh ground black pepper
  • 1 lb ground beef

Instructions:

1. Prepare the dough first. Place the butter in the freezer for ~20 minutes prior to getting started.
   • Sift the salt into the flour.
   • Grate the cold butter into the flour.
   • Slowly stir the water into the mixture until a shaggy mixture forms. Then turn it out onto a floured surface and smush into a ball with your hands. (You don’t need to knead this dough!)
   • Refrigerate while preparing the filling.
2. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large pan. Once warm, add the onions. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 3-4 minutes.
3. The add the tomato paste and the herbs & spices. Cook another minute.
4. Now add the meat to the pan. Break up into small pieces and cook until almost completely done.
5. Refrigerate the filling while rolling out and cutting the dough. The filling should be cool before placing on the dough.
6. Remove your dough from the fridge. Roll out into two circles, an 1/8th of an inch thick. Using a mold (or a cup or a bowl), cut out rounds of dough.
7. Place a small dollop of meat into the center. Don’t overfill! Crimp the edges together to seal. (Check out the link in our post above or YouTube “repulgue” to get visual hints how to make it pretty!)
8. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Bake the empanadas for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

*Side note: these can be frozen prior to baking. They then can be baked from frozen, adding an extra 5-10 minutes to the bake time.

Makes ~ 2 dozen – this obviously depends on the size you decide to make!