I'll give you the whole recipe in a minute. But first, the one thing that actually separates a great empanada from a sad one, and it isn't an ingredient.
You make the filling the day before and you put it in the refrigerator overnight.
That's it. That's the secret every Argentine grandmother knows and nobody writes down, because to her it isn't a technique, it's just how long it takes. Warm filling is loose filling. Loose filling soaks into the dough, tears it, leaks out in the oven and welds your empanadas to the tray. Cold filling is firm, holds together while you're sealing, and releases its juice inside the sealed pastry where it belongs.
Every empanada disaster I've ever seen traces back to somebody being in a hurry the same afternoon.
What Kind of Empanada Are We Even Making
There's no such thing as "the Argentine empanada." There are about two dozen regional versions and people argue about them the way Americans argue about barbecue.
In Salta they're small, made with potato in the filling, baked in a clay oven, and eaten with a pepper sauce. In Tucumán they use matambre, they're juicier than anything else in the country, and they're traditionally fried in beef fat. Catamarca puts raisins in. Mendoza tends to be more restrained, Córdoba sweetens the filling and dusts the finished empanada with sugar, which starts fights.
What I'm giving you here is the Buenos Aires baseline. Beef, onion, sweet paprika, cumin, olives, egg. It's the one most people mean when they say empanada de carne, and once you've got it you can wander off in any direction you want.
The Filling
Makes enough for about 24 empanadas.
**You need:**
- 2 lb (900 g) beef chuck or bottom round, cut by hand into small dice
- 3 large yellow onions, diced fine
- 4 scallions, sliced
- 3 tbsp beef fat, or neutral oil if you have to
- 2 tbsp sweet paprika (pimentón dulce, the Spanish kind)
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp crushed red pepper, more if you like
- 1 cup beef broth
- Salt
- 4 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
- 20 green olives, pitted and halved
About the meat: cut it with a knife. Not ground. A quarter-inch dice, roughly. It takes twenty minutes of annoying work and it's the difference between an empanada that tastes like meat and one that tastes like a taco. In Argentina this is called carne cortada a cuchillo and restaurants advertise it on the sign, which should tell you how much it matters.
If you truly can't face it, ask your butcher to run it through the grinder on the coarsest plate once. Once.
What you do:
Melt the fat in a wide pan over medium heat. Add the onions with a good pinch of salt and cook them slowly until they're soft and translucent, about fifteen minutes. Don't brown them. You're not making French onion soup.
Add the scallions, then pull the pan off the heat and stir in the paprika, cumin and chili. Off the heat, because paprika burns in about four seconds and burnt paprika tastes like a campfire ashtray.
Back on the heat, add the beef. Cook just until it loses its raw color, maybe three minutes. You are not browning it and you are not cooking it through. It's going to cook again inside the empanada, and meat that's fully cooked now will be dry and grey later.
Add the broth, season aggressively with salt, and let it come together for two or three minutes. It should look wet, almost soupy. That's correct. That liquid turns to jelly in the fridge and back to juice in the oven.
Now take it off the heat, spread it in a dish, let it cool on the counter, and put it in the refrigerator overnight.
Tomorrow, stir in the chopped egg and the olives. Not tonight. The egg gets rubbery.
The Dough
You can make it. You can also buy it. There are many frozen discs sold as tapas para empanadas that are genuinely good and you'll find them in any supermarket with a Latin aisle. Look for the ones labeled para horno if you're baking and para freír if you're frying. They're different thicknesses.
If you want to make it:
- 4 cups (500 g) all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup (100 g) beef fat, melted, or butter
- About 1 cup (250 ml) warm water
Mix the flour and salt, work in the fat, add the water gradually until it comes together. Knead it for five minutes until smooth, wrap it, rest it for at least half an hour. Roll it thin, about an eighth of an inch, and cut circles around five inches across.
Beef fat gives you the flavor and the flaky, slightly crumbly texture of the real thing. Butter is fine. Shortening is a compromise nobody needs to make.
Filling and Sealing
Two tablespoons of filling in the center. Not three. Every beginner overfills, and then the seal splits and the juice runs out onto the tray and burns.
Wet the edge with a little water, fold it over, press it closed, and push the air out as you go. Then the repulgue: fold the sealed edge over on itself in a rope, pinching and folding, pinching and folding, working from one end to the other.
This is the part that looks impossible and then takes about six empanadas to learn. Watch a video, honestly, because it's easier to see than to read. If it's really not working, seal it flat with a fork and move on. Nobody at the table will love you less.
In Argentina the shape of the repulgue tells you what's inside, because a house making four kinds of empanada needs to tell them apart after they come out of the oven. Braided rope for beef, flat fork seal for chicken, a little knot for cheese. Whatever system you use, be consistent, or you'll be biting into surprises all night.
Cooking Them
Baked: oven as hot as it goes, 450°F, on a preheated tray. Brush the tops with beaten egg yolk if you want them shiny. Twelve to fifteen minutes, until they're blistered and browned in patches. Not uniformly golden. Patchy is what you want.
Fried: beef fat or neutral oil at 350°F, two or three at a time, about three minutes, turning once. Drain them on a rack, not paper towels, or the bottoms go soft.
Either way, eat them standing up in the kitchen while the next tray goes in. That's not a suggestion, that's just what happens.
One Last Thing
Empanadas are the most forgiving thing in the Argentine repertoire. The filling can be leftover braised beef. It can be chicken, ham and cheese, corn, spinach, tuna. It freezes raw and bakes straight from frozen with five extra minutes.
Which is why it's the food that shows up when something happens. Someone moves, someone's sick, someone's celebrating, there's a match on. A tray appears. Nobody planned it.
Make the filling tonight. Figure out the rest tomorrow.
Brian, you local grillmaster
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