I'm taking a little trip through my Culinaria Spain book. It's a wonderful book that details all the regions in Spain. It explores their culture, landscape and how it has influenced their traditional culinary specialties.
It also gives recipes to those traditional foods from each region. The book is enormous so I'm sure it will keep me busy for a while.
This was the first time I made a large empanada. I decided to do it with turkey instead of the traditional pork. The recipe I was referencing said to bake this at 355 degrees. It turned out to be too low and I had to cook it longer to get it golden brown. The result...the dough was too hard and the inside dried out a little. I would try 375 degrees in the future. Also, having tried the large size now, I would probably do single serving size empanadas instead.
I started with diced mushrooms, celery, onions and garlic. First, brown the ground turkey with s&p, and lots of sweet paprika. Remove when browned and add the diced veggies and sauteed with s&p, paprika, and when softened add a little white wine. Reduce wine to au sec and then add some chicken stock and the ground turkey back to the pan.
Roast a Priscilla pepper and a tomato over open flame until blackened. Place the pepper in a plastic bag and sweat for a couple minutes. Remove from bag and peel skin off with your fingers. De seed, and dice pepper, then dice tomato. Add to turkey mixture.
Saute until moisture is mostly absorbed. While that is cooking, make a simple dough with 4.5 cups of flour, 2 Tbs of olive oil, 2 Tbs white wine, a little warm water, a pinch of salt and sugar, and knead until it comes together.
Roll out half the dough to a size large enough to cover your pan.
Lay in your greased pan and fill with your cooled down turkey mixture.
Roll out the other half of the dough and lay over the top of your pan. Pinch the sides together and roll over.
Roll out extra dough scraps and make a nice design on the top. Brush with egg yolk and bake at 375 for about 30 minutes.
Remove from oven when golden brown.
The filling was tasty, but if I were to try this again I would definitely add tomato paste the the turkey mixture. I didn't have any at the time but the traditional recipe calls for it. It would really help to have that to moisten the mixture and give it more of a sauce. Overall this was a fun and I'm going to make them again today but try some variations on them. This time I'm also going to make them individual size pockets instead.
