Empanadas – The Recipe
Posted on Dec 30 in Colombian Food, Food Porn, How-2, cooking, deep fry, latino, recipeby nikaPrint
EMPANADAS
Deep-fried meat pastries. These are served as appetizers because they will not keep their crispness for more than 1/2 hour. In other words, as you fry them, have someone serve them to your guests. As the guests bite into them, they may squirt lime juice into them from cut-up limes, or they may spoon “pique” (recipe follows) sauce into the bitten-off empanada. You may not want to “fill-up” the guests on these if you are planning on more food. Otherwise, if it is just an Empanada Party, make lots of them along with fried yuca and patacones, serve up with lots of cold beer, coke or margaritas!
Ingredients:
- 1 lb of lean pork meat (1 lb of dark turkey thigh meat, or a turkey roast that has mostly dark meat in it) two large red potatoes
- two eggs
- small onion
- 2 cloves cut up garlic
- Pinch of ground annatto seeds
- bay leaf
- 1 tsp ground comino
- salt
Directions:
Place meat , potatoes and eggs in enough water to cover them. Add the small cut up onion, garlic, a pinch of ground annatto seeds, bay leaf, cominos and salt. Bring to boil, then lower to simmer. In about 1/2 hour when the potatoes are tender and the eggs are hard boiled, remove them. Simmer the meat for at least another hour.
Remove meat and cool completely.
Preparation of the meat filling:
Grind the cooked meat in a food grinder, or in a food processor. Chop the potatoes and the eggs finely. Add the eggs and potatoes to the ground meat. Now you must prepare a spicy “hogao” sauce to add to the meat mixture.
Hogao
Ingredients:
- 2 large tomatoes, finely chopped
- 4 green onions, finely chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 tblsp of cilantro, minced
- 1/2 tsp. ground comino
- Pinch of ground annatto seeds
- salt to taste
- 3 tblsp of olive oil
Directions:
Heat oil in a saucepan and add all of the ingredients. Cook over medium heat until everything is mushy. Add this “hogao” sauce to the meat mixture. You will need to add some broth left over from cooking the meat, in order to get the meat filling moist. You don’t want the filling to be dry.
Preparation of the corn dough:
2 cups of yellow “masa-harina” La Venezolana or ArepaHarina Colombiana corn meal (Latino Food Store) This is NOT the same masa-harina “Quaker” Mexican style! Salt to taste 3 cups of boiling water, plus a tablespoon of brown sugar. (broth is better but if you have run out, make a broth with chicken bullion cubes) Pour the boiling hot broth in a heat proof container, stirring constantly, slowly pour in the 2 cups of “ArepaHarina”, this will get pretty thick and hard to stir towards the end. Try to knead it as much as you can with the spoon, but eventually, as the dough cools, you can knead it with your hands. When the dough looks pretty smooth, about 5 minutes of kneading, cover it with a plastic or moist towel to keep it from drying out.
In a heavy deep frying pan, pour about 3 inches of oil. (If you were going to do this in Colombia, it would be LARD! ) Start heating the oil over medium/high heat.
Shape dough into the size of small golf balls. You can do this golf ball shaping ahead of time as long as you keep them covered.
How to make Empanadas:
Flatten a ball with a flat object such a a plate sprayed with Pam, also spray the surface underneath. Place a heaping tablespoon of meat filling on one hemisphere of the flattened dough. Fold the other half over and pinch together so that there is NO opening showing any filling. The trick here is to get as much meat mixture inside of minimum dough. This will take practice. Otherwise, your empanadas might have more dough to them than meat! Place carefully in the hot oil and fry until golden brown. Drain on papers towels and serve immediately with lime quarters or “pique” sauce.
PIQUE SAUCE
This sauce/relish is similar to “pico de gallo” except it does not include the minced jalapeno. If you want to use jalapeno, you can, but it’s not legitimate Colombian. As I said before, this relish is spooned into a bitten-off empanada. Yummmm!
Ingredients:
- 6 cleaned green onions
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice
- 1/4 cup of minced cilantro
- 1 tsp of ground comino
- 1/8 cup of sugar
- 1/2 cup of white vinegar
- salt to taste
Directions:
Finely mince the green onions and the garlic. Add the other ingredients and let marinate for at least 2 hours. There should be enough liquid to almost reach the top of the relish. You may have to adjust by adding a little more vinegar.
These preparations are “labor intensive”, so you must prepare some of them at least two days or more in advance of your party or freeze them. If you freeze the empanadas, keep them separate while freezing but let them thaw out 1/2 an hour before frying them.
Copyright 2005
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Hola Niki! Que puedo decir, tu sitio esta espectacular! Todo se ve tan delicioso ya tengo mucha hambre! LOL!! Tus fotos estan geniales! Increibles! Felicitaciones en sitio muy, pero muy bien hecho! Me haz llevado de regreso a Colombia y a las memorias de mi niñez! Recorde las visitas al campo en Boyacá donde mi abuelita , cuando mataron un cerdo y no lo comimos todito en un fin de semana! Gracias! Habiendo crecido en el Tolima, Lechona y tamales por supuesto son definitivamente mis favoritos!
Thank you so much for this wonderful site! The recipes are great, the pictures amazing! Really, I am super-impressed! I have been looking everywhere for a recipe for the Empanadas, I have finally found it! Thank you so much! Please keep up the great work!
Maryvel: I am so glad you like it and that you found what you needed! If you make some and have a chance, take a few shots of them and share! Hope they work out ok for you. You live in the frozen north too, so you know how food can help reconnect yourself to a past that seems a million miles away! I see that you have recently visited Colombia.. I last went more than 1/2 a lifetime ago! Its hard to go with a growing family, I admire anyone who can do that
My wife and I just returned from Cartagena. We had a blast! We loved the arepa de huevos and empanadas. I was looking for a recipe when I found your site. WOW…what great photos….I would love to put these on my new site. Thanks so much
Doug
Doug, Glad you are enjoying the site… you can take photos like these too, a little practice and check out my Food Photo 101 pages at http://nikas-culinaria.com/food-photo-101/
How many empanadas will this recipe make?
Holy cow! We have a Colombian bakery by the produce store we frequent. And they sell these empanadas. I figured I can make them at home, but figured I would have trouble making the dough, I use masa arepa for arepas, but I do have the other one. I wasn’t sure how they were made and my husband said to look in my Equadorian recipe books. Well, this is a Colombian recipe!!! Wow. Thank you thank you thank you.
Ana: You are very welcome!
I was wondering if you could make this recipe by using beef. And if so, what type and how much. I also would like to know how many empanadas this recipe makes. i’m so excited because i love these empanadas and have had a hard time finding the recipe. Thanks in advance.
Mannie: You can certainly do this with beef – treat like the pork re: amount and cooking. I have looked all through my laptop and can not find my recipe doc right now so I cant tell you the approx count, sorry!
UM UM K Rico
Hi Nika,
I have not been able to find either La Venezolana or ArepaHarina Colombiana corn meal here in New Hampshire. Do you know of any online sites that may have it or places in Mass they may be worth the drive? I know it makes a HUGE difference. Thanks for any info.
Gail: I know of a store in Worcester that sells ginormous bags of all types.
they are at
Compare Foods Supermarket
664 Main St
Worcester, MA 01610
http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/showStore.php?SID=35
Here is a link to the company La Venezonlana http://www.venezolanacorp.com/home/OurProducts/tabid/55/modId/467/LCPage/2/eType/ALL/LCTag/ALL/Default.aspx
Hello Nika, I haven’t tried any of your recipes. but I myself, have perfected the empanada, antioqueño style, though with a lot of help from my Colombian family. Do you have a recipe for red beans and rice?
Nika, I live in the UK Englan and i find it really difficult to find the Harina for my empanadas. I was wondering if it is cheao to get imported from colombia in bulk? Also i went to the supermarket and got cornflour but it wasnt the right one, cornflour is just the translation from spanish to English. is Masa Harina ok and are there any others Harina that i can use for my empanadas, please help me!!
muchas gracias Nika
J: you mean like the red beans and rice in Louisiana style or colombian style?
Andres: No do not use the masa harina – you have to use the masarepa (precocida)
I have never tried to order via web to the UK or here for that matter so I do not have any recommendations!
Nika,
Colombian style red beans.
Nika, I found it really difficult to find mas harina but i did find it, however You are saying to use masarepa, is it quite easy to find and are the benefits from using masarepa rather than masa harina?
Cheers
Hi, I’m so glad that I found you blog. My husband is half Columbian and I’m Chinese. He keep saying how much he missed the Columbian empanadas, I have never been to Columbia, so I dont know what it taste like. After I go through the recipes……it’s a bit like the Chinese dumpling( the shape and stuffing), but we boiled not deep fried.
We live in Hong Kong and we don’t have any Latino food store here, the only “masa-harina” that I can find here is “Bob’s Red Mill” . Is this ok to use?
Thanks