Thinking of Empanadas

Hey hello and welcome back on my blog!
I hoped you liked the previous post about Arepas and maybe you even tried to make it for yourselves to see and taste how delicious these Arepas and their fillings are.

Today I am staying in the Latin Cuisine and I want to talk to you about another favorite food I like to eat and that is the Empanada. This crispy and tasteful snack always does me a lot of good as a breakfast snack before a hard day of work. This crunchy corn flavored outside shell with a filling of the most deliciously made chicken or meat, who can’t resist that. Here on the island were I live, we have a big Latin community that makes and sells them every day, so you can enjoy them all the time. Also the local supermarkets sell these homemade goodies in their shops but you need to hurry up in the morning if you want a couple of empanadas because they are gone before you know it!
For me personally I would have two or three of these Empanadas in the morning and I would be good to go for a couple of hours. My personal favorite one is with a filling of seasoned chicken, and I would always take two or three of them if I was on time of course. This tasty and hearty snack would always give me a big smile and a good boost to start a hard day of work to come.

But let me stop talking about how good I think they are and let me tell you what I found out about this delicious snack from Central and South America, to tell you more what an Empanada is.

So this is what I found, an Empanada is a Corn crusted dough with a variation of fillings in them, which will be baked or fried, depening where you are in Latin America. This savory crunchy and tasteful goodie is similar to other dough and filling recipes through out the world. People compare them or find them similar to meat pies or samosas to name a couple as example. It is all a sort of stuffed dough to simplify it a bit. But they are definitly not the same in my eyes, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy them all in their own way but the Empanada has a special place in my heart and stomach.

The filling of these crunchy tastefullness range from vegetarian to meat, chicken, seafood and even fruits. And there many websites that have different kinds of recipes for the dough and the rich variation of fillings if you want to make it yourself. In Argentinia you will even find restaurants that only sell Empanadas!

In Latin America they eat this deliciousness as a snack, as a side or as a  meal or a dessert, like the Guava and queso empanada. The name Empanada comes from the spanish word Empanar what means ” to roll or to cover or to wrap”. As the dough covers the filling or filling is rolled in the dough. In the Argentinian province Tucumán there is an annual National Empanada Festival where they celebrate this tasty food with a traditionally fillings of tripe/cow stomach, beef and chicken. This festival is held each September.

This festival is for me personally on my bucketlist and I would love to explore all these recipes of the fillings and variations of dough. I hope I made you curious about this food and maybe the next time when you see it coming by you will give it a try, you won’t be disappointed. I also feel like we are in a bit of a theme at the moment so let me make this a triology about Latin food and make my subject of my next post about Pupusas, another tasty Latin food. This I learned from my old Sous Chef and culinary friend Alejandro but this will be for the next time.

I hope you enjoyed it and
Until we meet again….

Yohan