Recipe of the Week I - Empanadas

Hi everyone! Welcome to the first installment of Recipe of the Week. Today I'll give you the recipe for a Venezuelan dish I love, empanadas. They are similar to arepas but sweeter and fried; also you stuff them before cooking. Talking about stuffing, you can fill them with almost anything you can imagine; meat, chicken, fish, cheese, fried plantain or beans. I only like the cheese or fried plantain ones but as you can see there are plenty of options for the stuffing. This makes them food for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Here's the recipe, I hope you like them as much as I do :)

Ingredients

• 1 cup of "Harina Pan" or pre-cooked corn flour.
• 4 tablespoons of sugar.
• 1 teaspoon of salt.
• 1 and 1/4 tablespoon of wheat flour.
• 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil.
• 1 and 1/4 cup of room temperature water.
• Your preferred stuffing (I used white cheese).

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First mix the sugar and salt with the water until it dissolves. Then combine the flour (wheat and corn one) with the water that has the sugar and salt. Once it is well mixed then add the vegetable oil and let it rest for about five minutes. While the dough rests, grab a pot and add vegetable oil (it must cover the bottom and be about 1cm tall). Heat it at medium-high heat.

Now we grab a piece of tin foil or envoplast and stretch it out on the table. We take two tablespoons of dough and form a ball and then put it on top of the foil.

Now we flatten the ball into a disc, about 1cm thick. You can use your fingers or a rolling pin. The disc you form should be more wide than tall so you can fit more stuffing in it. Once we have our flat disk then we add our chosen filling on one side. It should be one or two tablespoons of it at most. beware of putting too much because then our empanada will split open.

Then we grab one side of the tin foil and fold it in half (this will give the shape to our empanada, the disc should be folded in two). We need to close the borders, you can use a fork, your fingers or a small bowl.

When we are done then we take it with the spatula and let it fall in the pot with hot vegetable oil.

We wait for the empanada to brown and then flip it so that it cooks on the other side. Once they are cooked then we take them out and absorb the vegetable oil with a paper towel. And our empanadas are ready :)

I like them alone but you can eat them with guacamole, hot sauce or tartar sauce.

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I hope you liked this recipe and try it at home :) Leave any question, improvement or request for a recipe you'd like to know for next week in the comments. Until next time!

All pictures are mine. I took them with my Samsung J5 Pro.