Empanadas Salteñas

For those who have never seen one, we will say that the Salta empanada is a relatively small cake (in theory, an empanada should not be longer than the mouse that your reader uses to navigate these pages), with a soft dough but consistent enough to resist the high temperatures of its cooking without letting the content escape, with a texture and aroma capable of calling, at any time, the most modest appetites, and filled with a delicious pasta prepared with beef.

It has the shape of a croissant or half moon, as can be seen in the images, more or less fat, depending on the taste of each person.

Like any exquisite and popular dish at the same time, the Salta empanada has not one but several recipes and countless oral traditions and legends that accompany its journey and that deny and disallow any dogmatism.

what follows does not claim to be a recipe or a Salta liturgy. The way to prepare the empanadas that we will describe below is, therefore, as free as the people who make this dish with virtuous mastery and, consequently, it must be interpreted.

one recipe (out of a thousand)

The preparation of the empanadas from Salta is divided into two phases. one dedicated to the elaboration of the filling (called recado en jumps and not jigote) and another one to the dough that will wrap it. only the barbarians and the few informed give the message the name "picadillo" or "pasta".

The message is prepared first, since, well refrigerated and protected from high temperatures, a good message can be kept in good condition for several days. The dough, on the other hand, although it can be prepared in advance and stored in the refrigerator, tends to become impractical as the hours go by.

For the errand, care must be taken to select the meat with some care. Regardless of the name of the cut (which usually varies a lot according to the places), the rear cuts of the beef are always preferable. buttock, loin ball, pulp, picana, armpit, round, babilla, kaiserteil, are names associated in different countries with meat for Salta empanadas. A Salta page suggests preparing the empanadas with "roof beef" (sic), a cut that you can find on this site.

if in doubt, ask the butcher for a good cut for milanesas (breaded schnitzel or fillets or wiener schnitzel). The important thing is that the meat we buy does not have fat or nerves.

normally with two kilos of meat (and without incurring the sin of bloating the hard-boiled egg or potato patties) you get between seven and eight dozen patties.

for this quantity of meat it will be necessary to have, to start, two medium onions, which must be cut into very small pieces.

In a rather large casserole or saucepan, melt a piece of fat, preferably beef. pella, according to the dictionary, is "the lard of the pig as it is removed from it," so we already know what we are talking about. the fat must be of the whitest and most neutral aroma. it is advisable, by the way, to cut it into small pieces to accelerate its fusion.

After all this process, at least one centimeter of melted fat will remain in the saucepan where, once warmed, the chopped onion should be submerged and made into a sauce. The onion should be done over a rather low heat and it will be enough to make it transparent, preventing it from turning dark and starting to release a sweet flavor that generally spoils the flavor of the pie. done this, he retires from the fire and takes on other tasks.

Meanwhile, we cut the meat patiently and neatly with a knife on a clean board of other ingredients and with a suitable tool. the first cut must be made in the direction of the grain, depending on the piece chosen. We make strips of the fillets no more than a centimeter wide (the normal is between 0.5 and 1 cm). Then, we put all the strips together and cut them crosswise, trying to obtain small but not tiny cubes.

the meat of the filling of the Salta empanadas is cut with a knife. Minced meat empanadas with a traditional meat mincer or with a food processor or food processor are not the authentic Salta empandas, although in some places in Salta machine minced meat is used to prepare delicious fried empanadas.

then between half a kilo and ¾ of good quality potatoes are peeled. They are cut even smaller than the meat, taking care in any case that the resulting pieces are of a rather uniform size so that they later obtain an even cooking. If we are going to prepare the empanadas in the oven, the potatoes should not be fully cooked. In some cases, it will be enough to immerse them in boiling water for a few minutes or give them a boil. the potato squares should be a bit hard as they will finish cooking in the oven.

then, we rescue the onion sauce that we had reserved and put it over very low heat. Now add a little (1 teaspoon and a half) of very fresh sweet paprika, mixing well and ensuring that the paprika does not cook, as in this case the flavor will spoil. We also add cumin and ground chili, in moderate quantity. Forget parsley, oregano, basil, and other herbs.

Next, add the minced meat to the sauce and stir everything very well, ensuring that the oil covers all the meat and that it is evenly distributed and detached. the meat should not be cooked, or even begin to turn white if our idea is to obtain juicy patties. At the slightest hint that the meat is beginning to be done, it should be removed from the heat. add the cut potato and stir very well. It is time to taste the salt and rectify if necessary. It should be borne in mind that in the subsequent steps there will not be many possibilities to attenuate the salt, so it is preferable to sin now by default and not by excess.

the preparation must rest for a while so that the meat and potatoes are soaked in the sauce, its aromas and flavors. in fact, the errand done yesterday tastes much better. Meanwhile, three eggs are cooked (hardened) and the best green onion is selected.

Only the green part is chopped and if the plant had an aromatic and well-formed white part, it should have been chopped with the previous onion. Place the green onion covering the saucepan, or reserve it to add it at the time of assembling the pie. it should not be mixed with the filling.

Once the eggs are cooked, the shell is removed and cut very small and with great care not to leave large or malformed pieces. it is also placed on the filling without mixing, although practice teaches that mixing the egg does not lead to loss of flavor. In any case, it will be necessary to mix it in the event that we have passed a little salt, as it will help to moderate the flavor. the message is practically ready to assemble the empanadas.

They do not intervene in the preparation, as you may have noticed, ingredients such as raisins, olives, peas, or cow's foot gelatin, or oil, or marrow, or broth, or sugar, or vinegar.

the onion sofrito tolerates a half green or red pepper, chopped like onion, but it is also advisable not to abuse. Once this is done, the message must rest and necessarily be stored in the refrigerator, be it summer or winter.

preparation of the dough

you have to prepare the dough. in its preparation you will need flour, melted pork fat, water and salt. The dough of the Salta empanada does not contain - as far as it is known - eggs, self-rising powder, yeast or milk.

On a firm, wide and very clean surface, arrange a kilo and a half of wheat flour in the shape of a crown. in the center add the rather warm lard. the flour is carefully mixed with the fat and water with salt is added, little by little, until the dough is binding and can be stretched. the excess of water is corrected with more flour and some fat, and when the dough acquires sufficient consistency (that is, when it is stirred a little it does not adhere to the surface) it is necessary to give it a couple of coats of fat to make it better.

puff pastry is, according to those who know this, alien to the true pie from Salta. the dough that is sold in supermarkets can get us out of trouble, but it is not recommended. If there is no other option than to buy the dough made, it is convenient to discard the puff pastry.

This being the case, the dough that we have prepared must rest and not allow it to dry out or crack. the dough should be cold stretched easily. To prepare the tapas of the empanadas, it is advisable to separate the dough into small balls of about five or six centimeters in diameter, smooth them one by one with a stick until they form discs whose dimension is quite similar to that of a cd. It is therefore advisable to use a disused CD (the format of the CD is irrelevant) and help yourself with it to cut the covers. once the covers are cut, the assembly begins. To make the task easier, some ladies often cut a small segment of the bow in the disc to better fix one of the ends.

Once this has been done, with a normal spoon a not too abundant quantity of recado is placed on the dough disk to allow that when the disk is folded in half, its edges can be joined without effort. To join the edges, depending on the dough, it is convenient to dip them slightly in warm brine and press them tightly with your fingers without damaging the dough.

more gently now, the edge must be folded (from the cut to the tip) drawing from one end of the arch to the other curls that are achieved with the coordinated action of the thumb and index finger. This operation is known precisely as re-thumbing, so that what the fingers do is the secret of the appearance of the pie. the movement must be rhythmic to obtain a regular and not uneven repulgue (simbado or cimbado, according to others).

the result should be a continuous, spiral curl, with the appearance of a very fine baluster. This completes the pie and gives it sight and security for cooking. The empanada thus adopts its characteristic shape although some prefer to give it an even more kidney shape by pressing with a finger on the inner center of the empanada and bringing the ends together until this point.

patties are arranged on a shallow, flat oven surface. This must be at a very high temperature (500º?). the clay oven is ideal for this purpose, although one from a normal kitchen should give acceptable results. If the oven is at the right temperature, in a few minutes the empanadas will be done.

It is truly amazing that even using the same ingredients and similar techniques, the varieties of flavor, aroma and texture of Salta empanadas are virtually endless.