Cooking with Bea

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law, Bea, came to stay with George and me once Ben and Stephanie got things with the new baby under control a bit. When they lived in Buenos Aires around the time Ben was born, their housekeeper Ventura was famous throughout the city for her empanadas. Now, considering both the fact that a lot of people in BA make empanadas and that she was from a Bolivian background means she must have had game. Since her recipe is lost in the sands of time, we decided to have an empanada night to try to recreate some of those flavors. I have a good Venezuelan empanada recipe, but Bolivian is definitely different.

We only remembered to take pictures part way through, so you'll just have to trust me on the first few steps. The first thing you need to do is make the dough because it needs to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes or as much as overnight. This is the recipe I used:

Ingredients for 15 medium size or 25 small empanada discs:

3 cups all purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

6 oz unsalted butter (1 ½ sticks), cold and cut into 12 pieces

1 egg

4-5 tbs water

Preparation:

1. Mix the flour and salt in a food processor.
2. Add the butter, egg and water until a clumpy dough forms.
3. Form a ball and chill in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.
4. Roll out the dough into a thin sheet and cut out round disc shapes for empanadas (use round molds or a small plate).
5. Use immediately or store in the refrigerator or freezer to use later.

In the spirit of disclosure, I'll admit that I cut the recipe in half because it sounded like too much dough...but I totally forgot and used all of the butter. Frankly, it made the dough really workable and still tasted yummy. Not that I'm advocating doubling the butter, but clearly it was not a huge faux pas. So I threw the ingredients in my kitchen porsche (stand mixer) and then wrapped it up and stuck it in the fridge while we made the filling.

We decided to go with beef and I had purchased a chuck roast. We threw about a pound and a half into my trusty food processor. Suddenly, we had ground beef and I realized my food processor did even more things that I realized. We also halved 8 or 10 red potatoes and boiled them until they were tender (~15-20 minutes), but probably only used about half of them in the end. We diced up a medium white onion, 2 or 3 cloves of garlic, and one green and one orange chili (not sure what kind, but they smelled way spicier than they tasted) using the food processor. After turning on the range hood to vent the spicy smell and choking half to death on pepper fumes, we were ready to move on.

We also needed hard boiled eggs and Bea shared the trick of dunking them in an ice bath once they had finished boiling to avoid a ring around around the yolk.

boiling the eggs

eggs in the ice bath

Once they were cooked, we diced up the eggs and potatoes, along with several pitted green olives. We also added some peas (the less sweet the better)- maybe a quarter of a cup. 

We took the newly shredded beef and browned it in a deep skillet, along with the onion, garlic, and peppers. To this this we added some salt, pepper, and cumin. You can add paprika if you're into it, but we didn't. Bea also did something with beef bullion and a little water or chicken stock, but I'm not sure what it entailed. I think I was slicing something ;) Anyway, once everything is browned and cooked through and any applicable liquid is cooked off, you can remove the pan from heat and transfer the beef mixture to a bowl. Once in the bowl, add your potatoes, egg, olives, and peas. Also add 1/4 cup or fewer raisins. Told you Bolivian is different. 

the nearly finished mixture

Now you're ready to make your dough into the crust. I rolled out the dough on a floured cutting board. Optimally, you would have a cutter or other round object with a diameter of 4 inches or more, but we used the top of a drinking glass since that was about the best I had.

cutting the dough

The small circles we had made for some mini-empanadas, which might be fab at parties as an appetizer. We put maybe a teaspoon of filling in each crust, then crimped the edges together and painted the top with an egg wash. 

Crimping the top

Finished bundles resembled pot stickers

We put our finished empanadas on cookie sheets covered in parchment paper and put them in the oven at 400 until they started to brown, which was around 20 minutes on convection. 

here's how they came out

A few of them popped open a bit, but they all tasted good. George added salsa to his and Bea and I ate ours plain. 

mmm, flaky

Bea's verdict was that though they were tasty, they still weren't as good as Ventura's. Since I cut the dough quantity in half, we had quite a bit of extra filling with no empanadas to live in. The next night we made burritos with the filling, which were also excellent with a little salsa and Mexican cheese. Good times! 

Leftovers weren't a burden