Empanaditas (The Philippines)

Allegra describes Empanaditas as little porky flaky pastries, and that's precisely what they appear to be. They looked great in the book and the only problem I had with them was that the insides seemed like a rather odd combination. 

As you would expect, there are two main steps; making the pastry and making the filling.

The filling is made up of a combination of minced pork, glass noodles, sultanas, onion, potato and pumpkin, with seasoning thrown in.



Pumpkin, aka my new best friend!

To start with, you fry the mince with the onions. When the meat is cooked, you add the potato, pumpkin and saltanas and then leave it to cook on a low heat with the lid on for about 20 minutes. 

When the potatoes and pumpkin have softened enough, you take it off the heat and leave it to cool.  To finish it off, once the meat mixture has cooled, you lightly mash it, add in the cooked noodles and fresh corriander and its ready to go into the pastry shells.

The pastry is made using iced water, mixed into the flour and butter mixture.

I'd actually never made pastry this way before so I was excited to try it and see what effect it had. 

As you can see, the resulting pastry was very sticky and looked more like a very solid sponge mixture than any pastry I'd ever made.  Soph, however, assured me that it was the desired outcome and that after some time chilling in the fridge it would be a very workable dough.

As it said in the book, the main challenge for this dough is that it has a very high fat content. This means that it melts rather quickly when it's out of the fridge and if it's overworked it can become very sticky. Because of this, Soph took over pastry duty when it came time to roll out the pieces for the pastry cases.

The rolled a length of pastry out, used a cake-cutter to cut circular pieces, and then rollled over them another two or three times to turn them into ovals. 

It took a little bit of trial and error to get the thickness of the pastries right. Thicker is easier to fill without ripping but the pastry then takes longer to cook. 

Since Soph was working away on this task, portioning the filling and folding the pastry into pockets fell to me.  As you can see from the pictures, I probably wasn't the best choice for this either - my niece probably could have done a better job. 

My first attempt and making
a pocket

Before I had been struggling for too long, Soph did point out that I was probably finding it harder because I didn't cut up the noodles. In my defense, I did think this was odd but I was following the recipe. No where in the book does it say to cut the noodles up into smaller pieces (probably because Allegra assumes we'll exercise some common sense). 

So I proceeded with the filling and folding and slowly improved my technique. 



Taking scissors to the filling mixture
in an attempt to make them
easier to portion


Next came the interesting part; deep frying.  Once we figured out the best timing option, we were on a roll and all-in-all we were done in about 20 minutes.

By the time we were ready to plate up, Soph and I were very excited for the outcome because they looked and smelled incredible. There was nothing too spicey or odd involved for me to panic about but for some reason I was still a little nervous. As it turned out though that was completely unfounded.

The pastry was great. It cooked perfectly and had a lovely crisp to it while managing to stay quite moist. The filling was also excellent. It had a marvelous mix of flavours; none of which was overly strong or overpowering. The blend was superb and the noodles added a nice texture contrast.

Overall we were thrilled with the outcome.  We even used some of the filling and wrapped it in spring roll pastry and that was equally delicious. I would definitely recommend you try this recipe.