Name: Reseña de Empanadas por hurkanakbiyik en Pata Negra, Amsterdam, Países Bajos
Item: Empanadas
Rating: 3.5
Author: hurkanakbiyik

Spain

A disc of dough folded over a savoury filling, sealed along the curved edge with a rope of pinched crimps and baked or fried: the empanada is Spain's portable pie, taken across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century and now claimed with more passion by Argentina than by the country that named it. The Galician original is a large flat pie of yeasted bread dough, filled with tuna, peppers and onion or with pork, cut into squares and eaten cold at fairs. The hand-sized half-moon is the form that spread: Argentina has a dozen provincial styles, Salta with potato and chilli, Tucumán with hand-cut beef and lemon, Mendoza with olive and egg; Chile bakes the pino with beef, onion, raisin, olive and a wedge of hard egg; Colombia fries a corn-dough pocket. The crimp, the repulgue, tells a regular which filling is inside before the first bite.

The dough for the baked Argentine style is flour, lard or butter, warm water and salt, worked just enough to come together and rested, then rolled thin and cut into rounds of twelve to fifteen centimetres. The classic filling, carne cortada a cuchillo, is beef diced small by hand rather than minced, cooked with plenty of onion softened in beef fat, sweet paprika, cumin, a little chilli and spring onion, then cooled overnight so the fat sets and the filling can be portioned without leaking; chopped hard-boiled egg and green olive go in at assembly. A spoonful sits on each round, the edge is moistened, folded and sealed with a fork or with the twisted repulgue, and the empanadas are brushed with egg and baked hot, around 220°C, for twelve to fifteen minutes until gold, or deep-fried in beef fat until blistered. They are eaten in the hand, hot, with chimichurri or on their own.

Judge the crimp first: it should be tight and even, with no leaks, because a filling that has run out in the oven dries both pastry and meat. The pastry should be thin, crisp at the edge and tender elsewhere, flaking slightly when baked or blistered and dry when fried, never greasy or doughy. The filling should be juicy, with the fat from the onion and beef pooling slightly when the empanada is bitten, and should taste of its ingredients, with cumin and paprika as a background rather than a dust. Mark down minced beef in a style that calls for hand-cut, a filling that is dry or sparse, a thick pastry that outweighs the meat, a cold centre from a reheated batch, and sweet, cakey dough. The egg and olive in a pino are not optional. Three is a meal, and the first one should burn your fingers.

Empanadas

Netherlands

Pata Negra

Meat empanadas with spicy taste. Pickles inside. Nice black pepper touch.

I didn’t like the taste of bread too much oil. Relatively small compared to other empanada i have eaten so far.

Reseña de Empanadas por hurkanakbiyik en Pata Negra, Amsterdam, Países Bajos

Empanadas

Pata Negra

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