Beef Empanadas! We love empanadas at Edible After School because they are easy-to-make appetizers for when we cater large parties (up to 300 people!) and they always sell out quickly at the farmer’s market. We love the versatility of this little hand pie filled with savory or sweet, traditional or creative, vegetarian or meat fillings which allows us to use seasonal produce and showcase Pescadero organic farms.
Beef Empanadas made by Edible After School
We have tried out many recipes over the year some gluten -ree and some a combination of flour and masa. The masa recipes are harder to work with for turnovers (we do like to make tacos with it though) and not as flaky even when we use lard instead of butter. But they are much more flavorful and more traditional. A mixture of flour and masa can be used as well. The best mixed masa-flour empanada dough recipe we tested is Martha Stewart’s: flour-masa dough. However, my students prefer the flour recipe (printed below) for its ease and super flakiness.
Game Day Beef Empanadas with Avocado Crema
We have yet to experiment with some of the new non-gluten all-purpose flour mixtures that are now on the market but I’ve heard lots of praise from King Arthur’s new mixture as well as Cup4Cup developed by Lena Kwok for Thomas Keller at the French Laundry.
Empanada dough is made using the same as technique as a shortcrust except there is vinegar and egg added to the wet ingredients.
First, cut in the fat with the flour, then add the wet ingredients (vinegar, water, egg) until the dough comes together, and lastly knead dough a few times until it is pliable. It’s important to beat the egg with the wet ingredients and mix them thoroughly together (don’t add the egg separately) before adding to dry ingredients or the dough doesn’t combine well and it changes the elasticity. You will find your dough streaked with tough dried out yolk if you don’t head my words!
If making to consume for a later date: freeze empanadas on parchment on a baking sheet making sure they’re not touching. Once completely frozen they can be stacked and stored in ziplock bags without the risk of the the meat pies crushing, touching, or smooshing each other.
Don’t worry about defrosting them, just place the frozen disks on a baking sheet and bake away!
Puente’s Edible After School has been written up in Edible Magazine and other local publications including theHalfmoon Bay Review. Our program has existed for two years through sponsors like the Packard Foundation and private donors but we are ever growing and expanding and looking for help to buy ingredients, pay for kitchen rental, and buy computers so that we can add technology to our class and create an online teen-run cooking program and manage an online store selling our jams, pickles, and grab n’ go market items. Would you consider a donation to our program to help us continue teaching practical Math & English, Nutrition, basic & intermediate cooking, food safety & handling, teamwork and leadership?
