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Beef Cheek Empanadas

Empanadas are traditionally made using pork or rabbit in Spain, but they are a great way to use up leftovers. The South Americans are crazy for them, filling them up with all kinds of things. But they usually don’t use buttery short crust pastry. You can make enough to feed an army in a bit over an hour. They freeze well too, but don’t do the egg wash until you reheat them.

Beef cheek filling

You’ll need:

1Kg of trimmed beef cheek,
1 Onion, diced,
1 Carrot, diced
4 cloves of garlic, minced,
1 leek, diced,
2 bay leaves,
10 black peppercorns, whole,
a handfull of thyme,
1 litre of red wine, and
1 cup of beef stock.

What to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 140 degrees C.
Dice up all the veggies, put them in a caserole with a bit of oil and sweat them down for 15 minutes over low heat on the stove top.
2. add the beef cheek to the pot and brown it off.
3. add the wine, pepper and bay leaves.
Bring the mixture to the boil, then bang it in the oven with the lid on for about 6 hours.
4. The meat should be super tender by this point, but there should be some liquid left. Put the caserole back on the stove top and bash the meat around so its desicated. Simmer until just about all of the liquid is gone. You can add a bit of corn flower if you want to thicken the mixture a bit.

Empanada wrapper

This is just short crust pastry, follow the link if you’re not up on the ins and outs of short crust. Assuming you’ve made the dough continue on:

1. Raise the oven temp to 180.

2. Roll out the dough quite thin and cut out circles of dough. I use a glass with a wide mouth, something a bit bigger than an egg ring is fine.

2. Put a small dollop of the filling in the middle, not too much or it will just disintergrate. Then fold it up into a little pillow and fold the edges over to seal it up. repeat until you’ve run out of dough or filling.

3. Put all the empanadas on a baking tray and cook for about 15-20 minutes. At 5 minutes into the cooking brush them with egg wash, then again at about 5 mins to go.

4. Eat them nice and hot with a good quality oloroso sherry.