I’ve been on the lookout for a new empanada dough recipe that is both relatively easy to roll out, but more importantly, tastes good. For something that is basically pastry, there are several variations and mixing methods that I was curious to see if there was any difference.
The first one I tested, uses melted butter in the dough, and masa harina mixed with flour (2/3 ratio), and a bit of baking soda. So, i melted the butter and let it cool off, mixed it with the dry ingredients and let it rest in the fridge until well chilled.
you can see that using the melted butter makes it easier to incorporate into the dry ingredients. The dough is quite firm to roll out, and as I went along, I could see it was not going to respond well to re-rolling. i thought i’d do a couple anyway and bake them alongside the rest for comparison. I also made 3″ and 4″ circles.
Observations after baking:
- The dough is too firm and bakes up a bit dry
- the 3″ circles are definitely too small to do the proper empanada edging — i crimped the smaller ones with a fork
- the masa harina adds texture and a slight corn taste, but i think contributes to the dryness. All flour would probably be better.
- given there is butter in these, you can’t really taste it. Cutting in the butter like pastry would give more buttery flavour.
- The rerolled dough is definitely much tougher than the ones that were only rolled out once. i could tell as soon as i started crimping the edges that it was much more elastic.
Round 2: coming up