Living Chile

Fried food is something that I just don’t eat much of in California, but here in chile it is a regular part of my diet… Acknowledgement is the first step to recovery.

Two of the most popular fried foods in chile are empanadas and sopaipillas. Sopapillas are fried dough rounds that sometimes include a little bit of pureed zapallo (Chilean winter squash) in the batter. They are often eaten with mustard and/or hot nescafe. When my host mother goes to the effort of making dough and getting her wok of oil set up, she usually makes a lot of dough which she then forms into both sopapillas and empanadas. Empanadas were covered in my earlier post but this week I also learned how to make and form the dough for the empanada skin. Below is the dough recipe along with a list of typical empanada fillings.

The Dough:

This dough recipe will make 16 large empanadas (the size of the empanadas shown in the “traditional empanadas post”). Alternatively you can make more smaller empanadas or fewer with sopapillas. This is a lot of food but sopapillas can easily be reheated in the toaster and empanadas reheat well in the oven or microwave. Or if you really don’t want to eat that many, the recipe is flexible and can easily be halved.

Ingredients:

1 kg white four without baking powder

1/2 tbsp salt

3 tbsp vegetable shortening, melted (6 tbsp  for baked empanadas)

1 – 1 1/2 cups of hot water

Directions:

In a large bowl, mix salt and flour. Make a well in the flour mixture for shortening. Add boiling water in small increments, stirring in between each addition. When you can no longer stir with a spoon, resort to your hands. The dough should be the same consistency as bread dough. Knead vigorously on a floured surface until smooth and elastic.

When the dough has been well needed, divided it into the same number of small balls as you would like empanadas. Below is a picture demonstrating the approximate size of the balls. The smaller ball is for the cheese empanadas which we made with this dough. The larger ball is the size for the larger empanadas we made a few weeks ago.

For Empanadas: Using a rolling pin, flatten the balls into thin disks about 1/4 inch thick. If well floured, these disks can be stored in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for a few days prior to shaping and cooking the empanadas.If stored, the dough will dry out a little bit and you will need to use water to remoisten the edges when sealing the empanadas (see older post). If used immediately no water is needed and you can proceed with the following instructions.

Create a small mound of filling in the center of the dough disk. Here we are using Queso de Manteca (a yellow/white cheese with a consistency like mozarella but with holes like swiss). My host mom says that she prefers Gouda cheese.

Fold the dough in half over the filling and use a fork or your fingers to mash the edges together.

Fold up the edges in a ruffle pattern.

For Sopapillas: Pat the balls into flat disks slightly thicker than the empanada skins. Using your fingernail create a small hole in the center of the disk (I have seen lots of sopapillas without the center hole, but this is my host mother’s method).

Cooking:

Fill a wok with 4-5 inches of oil and heat over a high flame. Test the temperature of oil by tossing in a tiny piece of dough- if it sizzles and cooks quickly, the oil is ready.

Lower the flame and gently place the empanadas and sopapillas in the wok. In this wok there was room for about 4 empanadas and 1 sopapilla at a time. Cook until the skin is golden brown, flipping once midway through.

Allow to cool in a paper towel lined pan until ready to eat.

Serve with mustard, katsup, hotsauce, or Aji (Chilean peppers).

Alternative Fillings:

• Traditional: beef, onions, hard boiled egg, raisin, and black olive
• Caprese: cheese, tomato, and basil
• Ham and cheese
• Cheese and Spinach
• Ham and Spinach
• Cheese and mushroom
• Cheese and Zucchini

The first meal I ate upon arriving in Chile was an empanada from the chain bakery Castaño. In the 6 weeks since that first lunch, I have eaten more of them than I can count. They come in all shapes and sizes with different fillings including ham and cheese, ham and corn, chicken and vegetable, caprese, spinach, and several other variations. This week, I had the opportunity to learn how to make empanadas with my host mother who is an excellent cook. We made a baked and a fried version with a traditional filling of beef, onions, hard boiled egg, olive and raisin. Below is a step by step guide of how we did it.

Ingredients

The Meat: My host mother strongly emphasized the importance of cooking the meat for an empanada filling the day before you plan to make the actual empanadas. This allows the flavors to blend and strengthen. In a large sauce pan, we sauteed beef brisket in 1 cm cubes with garlic, oil and paprika. Then we added finely chopped onion in a ratio of about 3-1 with the meat. We continued to saute the mixture until the onions were limp and slightly caramelized. We covered the pan an left it in the refrigerator overnight.

The dough: This is the one part I didn’t help with as it is a rather time consuming process which my host mother completed while I was at school. From what I gather the dough is rather similar to unleavened bread dough with a ratio of about 2.2 pounds of flour to 1/4 pound of shortening. Water and salt make up the rest. My host mother used a machine to roll to dough into perfect rounds which she stored stacked in a plastic bag in the refrigerator until we were ready to use them.

Other ingredients: Right before we assembled the empanadas, my host mother hard boiled three eggs. She peeled and sliced them and set them out with a bowl of unpitted black olives and golden raises.

Assembly

Once all the ingredients were laid out, we set up our assembly station with a large flat plate and a mug of water.

Next we placed a single round of dough on the plate and spooned 1/2 a cup of the meat and onion mixture into the center.

On top of the meat mixture we added 1 slice of egg, 1 olive, and a single golden raisin.

Then we dipped our fingers into the mug of water and wet half of the outer perimeter of the round of dough. The round was then folded in half and firmly pressed so that the wet edge formed a tight seal with the dry edge.

Cooking

For the baked version, we wet the edge of the assembled semicircle empanada and then folded over again with a deeper fold closer to the flat edge of the semicircle than the arc. This created a trapezoid shape. In the picture below are two examples made by my host mother (left) and one done by me (right). As you can see from my example, the exact shape of the empanada is not important and need not satisfy the trapezoid tradition. The finished empanadas were placed on a greased pan and brushed with egg. These were then baked in the oven until the crust was golden brown.

For the fried version, the edge of the semicircle was pinched into a wave like ruffle.

To fry the empanadas, my host mother heated a large wok with a deep pool of vegetable oil. She fried the empanadas two at a time turning them once when the bottom side was golden brown.

When evenly brown, she fished them out with a sieve and allowed them to rest on a paper towel before serving.

Enjoy!