Spanish-Inspired Beef Empanadas

Real talk: I am not so great with pastry doughs. As a matter of fact, I suck. However, part of my time off from the blog was spent working on my pastry skills. You're welcome.

For empanadas, I usually cheat and just use frozen puff pastry. I didn't have any, so this time, I found a very easy recipe from Martha Stewart's website (why does her website suck, btw?). I basically wanted to get an idea of the ratios for flour, butter, salt, and baking powder. It's a biscuit dough, really. Flaky and layered because of the butter. So feel free to improvise on your dough. I'll list my measurements here that I used in case you're too lazy to research this topic.

For the dough:
1 3/4 C flour
1 heaping tsp of baking powder
1 heaping tsp of salt
3/4 of a stick of COLD butter, chopped
ice cold water

Filling:
ground beef
1 chopped hard boiled egg
chopped olives
finely minced garlic
finely chopped parsley
1/2 cup of chopped onion
paprika
cumin
s+p
garlic powder
olive oil
finely grated pecorino romano cheese

1. In a food processor, add flour, baking powder and salt. Pulse. Then add cold butter and pulse until you get a mealy texture. While pulsing, stream cold water in from the top until your dough comes together.
Let it chill in the fridge, covered, while you get the rest of the filling ready. Preheat oven to 400°

2. Saute the garlic and parsley lightly in olive oil. Set aside. Saute the onion until translucent, set in same bowl as garlic/parsley. Brown the ground beef, adding paprika, cumin, s+p, and garlic powder. Be careful on the salt, your dough will have plenty, as well as the olives added. Mix together cooked meat, garlic/parsley, onion, olives, egg, and the cheese.

3. Roll out the dough until it is about 1/4-1/8 inch thick on a floured surface. Cut out 4 inch rounds. For this recipe, I was able to make 8 little empanadas. I had plenty of filling leftover. Add filling to the round and fold over. Then you can seal and press with fork tines to make it pretty. Set on a pan. Fill the rest.

4. Bake at 400° for 30-40 minutes, rotating the pan about halfway through. They were a little pale at the 25 minute mark, so I brushed them with a little milk so they'd get a nice tan.


FYI, this was totally unplanned and therefore I had none of the prep work done for this when the whim hit me. Therefore, my feet were sore and my back was tired by the time I was done. The saving grace was that it was delicious and the kids enjoyed it (I told them they were pizza pockets).