Making empanadas on our own

Empanadas de pino! They’re everywhere, as is the quality.

Once we took a Chilean cooking class, we wanted to try and make these completely on our own. I’d say we were pretty much completely successful, but here’s how it went =)

We did our shopping at a nearby supermarket and at La Vega (for the meat especially!). There aren’t many big supermarkets around, they’re mostly smaller stores with a few short aisles and 1 small case for each veggies and dairy. And bread, always fresh bread. So we went to the nearest one and got what we could find to help ease our shopping for La Vega, which was a bit further (and we were carrying everything back).

Once we got to La Vega I realized I didn’t know the translation for “top round” (and cell phone service wasn’t good enough to look it up in the market) so I trusted the butcher to give me the best meat for empanadas. He definitely delivered.

I think the spice mixture merkén (sometime spelled merquen) is key to the aroma and flavor of the pino mixture. I’d never heard of it before the cooking workshop but found that smoked goat’s horn chile seems to be the main ingredient, though it may also have salt, smoked coriander, oregano and cumin in the blend (the prepackaged blend I got from the nearest grocery store has the goat’s horn chili, “natural flavoring,” paprika, garlic, cilantro, and salt). An LA Times article from 2011 says merkén is now more easily accessible in the US with Whole Foods now selling it. Found it available on Amazon too. Worth a taste, it’s good on eggs, meats, cheeses, and I hear on chocolates too! (Must make a mental note to seek these out)

The meat and onion mixture for the filling tasted so good on it’s own, I’d highly recommend eating it atop rice if making dough is too much of an ordeal.

We used melted butter for our dough. I’ve yet to find where to purchase lard here, but it must be common around these parts with the availability of empanadas on every corner.

We’re staying at an Apart Hotel (apartment building for short-to-long term stays), which has a pretty basic kitchen. But we were missing a lot of things, like baking sheets, measuring utensils, a rolling pin, or dough cutter. So we made do.

In lieu of a rolling pin, we used a wine bottle, emptied of wine, and filled to the top and recorked with warm water. Instead of a dough cutter we used a small pan and a knife to trace the round edges (all the plates here are square!). Very luckily, this oven had a solid rack (possibly for the broiler?) and after washing it we placed our empanadas directly on this rack to bake. Our recipe uses metric units and estimated measurements based on the packaging (using 1/2 the flour in the 1 kilo bag, for example). Since we didn’t have white wine, we just used a cup of warm water.

It seemed like substituting the melted butter made the dough much wetter, so we didn’t need to add the second cup of water at all when kneading the dough.

It’s fun to stuff the empanadas, and make funky designs or patterns in the edges (which is why none of our empanadas matched each others)! No one says they need to be perfect to be absolutely delicious.

They went into the oven between the 205 and 210°C notches on the oven, and they took about 30 minutes to get brown and crispy on the top. 

In the Uncorked class we ate the empanadas de pino with pebre (which we LOVED) so we did that here as well. However, we must have eaten a dozen empanadas in our time here so far but since they’re such a handheld, to-go food, never experienced it with pebre ’till then!

Would love to hear any tips for making empanada dough sans lard if you have any.