Empanada Crust–Choose Your Own Filling!

Have you ever had that craving that you can’t resist? Well, I’ve had that many times. It’s been our custom as a family to have our “Friday Food Feast” since Friday is like Sunday to us in Bangladesh. That’s the time, we enjoy sumptuous food with our family and friends.

One Friday, I craved for “Empanada“–“a Spanish or Latin American pastry turnover filled with a variety of savoury ingredients and baked or fried.”

“Where can I get a recipe?”–That was one of my questions and then I suddenly remembered something!

As I mentioned in my previous post, my father loves cooking and he used to buy cook books from National Bookstore. Fortunately, my mom carefully kept one of them so I decided to bring it here in Dhaka so I pulled it out and looked for the recipe.

ALING CHARING’S FILIPINO & FOREIGN RECIPES by Rosario Fabian One of the priceless legacies of my father!

I found the recipe and tried it out. As almost everyone does, they try a recipe and post it on Facebook. 🙂 I did that too and one of my cousins asked me about the recipe for the crust only! So…let me share with you the recipe for the crust only from this book. 🙂 You can decide as to which filling you would like to put. You may put cooked tuna or any left over you have in your fridge. In my case, I used chicken curry.

Recipe for Crust
2 cups all-purpose flour (no sifting)
1 tsp. fine salt
6 tbsp. water
2/3 cup butter or margarine (chilled)
2 tbsp. white sugar

Mix sugar, salt, and flour. Cut in butter using a blender or 2 knives until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Sprinkle water and mix well with hand to form a ball. Knead lightly. Sprinkle flour on a board and roll out dough into 1/4″ thick. Cut using a round cutter (a medium sized saucer can be used if there is no molder. Place saucer up-sde down on dough and cut with a knife.) Then, fill each cut dough with 2 tbsp. of sauteed fillings. Fold dough to form a half moon, press one end to the other. Brush with egg yolk or milk. Arrange on a grease baking sheet. Bake at preheated oven until crust is golden brown.

There you go! The book did not specify the amount of time and temperature needed for this recipe but I set our oven to 190°C and baked the empanada for around 15 minutes. I followed my nose and turned it off when I smelled that it was done.

Here’s my very first empanada–and my guests appreciated it so much. Credits to the author of the cookbook! 🙂

Make your family happy with this empanada, and as I said, just choose your own filling! Of course, remember to thank God for this blessing before posting it on Facebook! Let me know if you succeeded in trying this one out.

Love, Nance