"empanada" news and stories

Happy National Empanada Day!

Named after the Spanish term for "baking in pastry," these savory turnovers popular in Mexican, Spanish and Latin American cuisines typically involve circular dough folded in half to encompass a variety of veggie-meat fillings. Empanadas are presumed to have originated in Galicia, Spain, where the pastries essentially served as portable pieces of sealed pie for the working class.

Their contents vary regionally -- Argentinian empanadas are usually stuffed with ground beef seasoned with cumin, olives and sometimes raisins; Chilean varieties typically use a higher onion-to-beef content, due to the high cost of meat, while Bolivian ones often have a partially liquid filling.

Blogger TheStoneSoup experimented with the vegetarian empanada recipe (pictured above) by Bourke Street Bakery, using an eggplant-onion-chickpea base brightened by cilantro and goat cheese. Try the recipe yourself -- or suggest your favorite empanada fillings in the comments!

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Spinach empanada with poblano sauce. Photo: Norwichnuts, Flickr.

It may be a little early in the day to be drooling over empanadas, but... wait, who are we kidding? There's never a wrong time to get excited about delicious-looking food.

These golden pockets of fried goodness from Flickr user Norwhichnuts may have us counting the minutes until lunch, when we can hit the streets and seek out something similar, but that doesn't mean we can't spend the morning in awe of the smooth, green poblano sauce, which serves as a colorful hint to the spinach and cheese hiding beneath the perfectly golden, flaky layers of fried pastry dough. Right?

[Via Flickr]

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