Empanadas: It’s What’s on the Inside That Counts
While on a quest last weekend to do something with kohlrabi and zucchini beyond simply sauteeing, this Straight From the Farm post piqued my interest in empanadas. Why sautee and then blend your vegetables when you can sautee, fold them up in pastry dough, brush with egg wash, bake at 425F for twenty minutes, and THEN blend them?
I followed the recipe pretty closely, except I replaced scallions with garlic scapes, left out the radish, and used extra olive oil instead of the olive oil-butter combo. About half of the mixture went into empanadas, and the rest went into the freezer to be saved for future puree or another round of empanadas in the depths of winter when I’m looking for excuses to crank the oven (oh, and will be able to EAT an empanada). I also made some with a sausage and goat cheese filling, because that is a fool proof combination, at least for people who eat sausage and goat cheese.
Empanadas are pretty fun to make, especially when you cheat and use pre-made dough — to make life easier, and because I have little confidence in my ability to make edible pastry, I used Goya frozen empanada wrappers — and the fun of it eased the disappointment of how they tasted in liquid form. To say it tasted like a pastry smoothie is misleading — although now I very much wish I had attempted this experiment with a chocolate croissant instead — because it didn’t taste only like the pastry, and yet, the flavors of the fillers were totally overpowered by the pastry.
Oh, the irony: that which can be wrapped around almost anything to make it infinitely better has the exact opposite effect when blended.
(For the record, Dan said the actual empanadas were great, and I earned some serious brownie points for making them.)
Yet again, I learn the hard way. Foods that play a foundational or vehicular role in a chewing person’s meal — lettuce, pizza crust, noodles, empanada dough — are rendered anywhere from futile to useless on the blender diet. The glutinous ones are the worst offenders, requiring so much liquid to be thin enough for the straw that it becomes an unmanageable amount of food to eat in one sitting (for me, anyway).
Here’s my advice: much like the secret gems within the Bittman salads, follow your cravings for the fillers and toppings and sauces you love, because they will make satisfying blender creations and this is your free pass during which there is no shame in openly eating extra helpings of pastry filling without the pastry, pasta sauce without the pasta or salad ingredients without the salade.
