A Spanish Empanada is Just a Giant Hot Pocket

Quick poll: Is empanada better served hot or cold? 

The correct answer is, it's always better cold, but it's hard to wait that long.

When we were visiting the pueblo at Christmas, my suegra made an empanada. The smell of this empanada was as intoxicating as the first blooms of azahar in Sevilla spring. To remove Don Loco (and, tbh, ourselves) from the temptation of eating the empanada before dinner, we went out on a pre-dinner paseo. We ran into some friends which turned into some impromptu cañas at the playground. 

By the time we got back home an hour and a half later, the entire empanada, meant to feed ten people, had been entirely eaten. The smell of the empanada lingered in the air, but the actual physical empanada, was gone.

What does this tell you? Empanadas may be best eaten cold, but if you wait too long, it might be gone.

Luckily for all of us, with a little bit of effort, we can make an empanada at home. Yes, even in these United States. Here is my exact recipe: 

Ingredients for your "Better Than a Hot Pocket" Spanish-American empanada

2 packages Dufour* puff pastry**

1 package ( 12 slices) thick-cut Cheddar Cheese (I like Trader Joe's cheese for this)

3 3-oz skipjack tuna packets, again from Trader Joe's. 

A cup? a half a cup? of tomato passata (the closest thing to tomate frito I can find in the States), I use the Mutti brand

1 egg 

Directions for making the Empanada in Seven Easy Steps:

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.*** Line a lasagna pan**** with parchment paper.

2. Mix the egg with a little bit of water. That is the egg wash. Mix the tuna with a little bit of tomato so it's coated but not too wet. That's the filling.

3. Put one sheet of puff pastry down on the pan.

4. Paint the edges of the pastry with an egg wash (just the beaten egg with a little water).  This is to seal the edges of the empanada dough

5. Put down a layer of six cheese slices,, then a scoop of tuna tomato on each slice, then cover each square of cheese-tuna with another slice of cheese. 12 slices total of cheese.

6. Drape the other puff pastry sheet on top, crimp the edges shut with a fork and poke holes in the top. Brush top with the rest of the egg wash mixture and pop it in the 400 degree oven for about 27 minutes or until super brown and puffy.

7. Let the glorious Bolsillo Caliente cool, first in the pan, then on a cooling rack, and slice into pieces with a pizza cutter. Makes a GREAT lunch.

*ATTENTION: There is only one sheet of puff pastry in the Dufour package. You need two, or you need to commit to folding it in half like a sincronizada (illustrated below).

**Money-saving tip: Every year, Trader Joe's sells incredibly cheap the exact same Dufour puff pastry, under the Trader Joe's label as "All Butter Puff Pastry". You need to stock up when they do it, because they sell two sheets per package for less than 5 bucks. Dufour is 14 dollars a sheet at Whole Foods, so you're spending a whopping 28 dollars in puff pastry alone vs 5 dollars at Trader Joe's. IT IS A TOTAL BARGAIN. Trader Joe's only sells the puff pastry between, approximately, Halloween and New Year's. I probably buy 20 packages in this time.

***Why 400 degrees? Because I line the pan with parchment paper. Previously I'd baked it at 450, and was always grumbling about how the parchment paper kept crumbling into charred bits after baking in the oven, until I read the package and realized that temps over 425 burn the parchment paper. Lolomg.

****I usually bake this in a lasagna pan because of the cheese overflow. 

As a guiri completely devoted to "keepin' it real" and "keepin' it 100%" here is my homemade Spanish empanada in all its unfiltered glory. Yes that is the shadow of my phone on top of the empanada. And yes, that's only half an empanada because I just started using the Dufour pastry sheets again and realized at the last moment that there were only one sheet in a box, but being the problem solver that I am, I just turned it into a Spanish sincronizada empanada. And that, mis amigos, is the true story of triumph over adversity.

La Empanada Española-Americana