The Southern Cone · Volume 25, The Río de la Plata Table
Empanada salteña
Salta, the Northwest
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Smaller than most other regional versions, discs roughly 11cm across, with a characteristic slightly charred look and a filling that is deliberately jugoso, wet, dripping slightly when first bitten into. A close regional cousin, the empanada tucumana, is made without potato or olives, using matambre specifically and a dough built with the meat's own cooking broth rather than water, a point of real regional pride between the two provinces; sourcing consulted for this chapter genuinely disagreed on which of the two carries the wetter filling, and that disagreement is not resolved here.
This chapter has not found a fully quantified, in-tradition gram or timing recipe for the salteña beyond composition and general practice; the quantities below are a workable, cookable version built from that composition, not a claimed traditional ratio, and should be read as such.
As tradition built it
Makes about 20. Roughly 2 hours including resting.
Ingredients
For the dough
- 500g plain flour
- 1 tsp sweet paprika
- 1 tsp salt
- 150g lard or beef fat, melted
- 150ml warm water, approximately
For the filling
- 500g beef, knife-cut rather than minced
- 2 boiled potatoes, diced
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 2 spring onions (cebolla de verdeo), sliced
- 1 red bell pepper, diced
- 2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
- 2 tbsp grasa de pella, pork fat, for cooking the filling
- 1 tsp ground ají molido
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp sweet paprika
Method
- Make the dough: combine the flour, paprika and salt, work in the melted fat, then bring together with warm water to a smooth, firm dough. Rest, covered, 30 minutes.
- Cook the onion and pepper gently in the grasa de pella until soft. Add the beef and cook through, seasoning with the ají molido, cumin and paprika.
- Off the heat, fold in the diced potato, spring onion and chopped egg. Cool the filling before assembling, so it does not blow the seal.
- Roll the dough thin and cut discs roughly 11cm across.
- Fill each disc generously enough that the filling is genuinely wet, and crimp the edge firmly along its whole length, the repulgue, rather than trusting a single fold.
- Bake in a hot oven, or fry, until golden and cooked through.
What a modern chef changes
The seal treated deliberately as a steam vessel, and the filling's moisture controlled rather than left to chance
Rung 4
Method
- Reduce the cooking liquid from the beef and onion separately before folding it back in, so the filling is wet enough to be genuinely jugoso without so much loose liquid that it splits the seal under steam pressure. Judge by texture rather than a fixed volume.
- Crimp with real, even pressure along the entire seam, checking for the smallest gap by pressing gently before baking. A fine crack under pressure is where the whole dish's juice escapes, and it is the single most common reason a home-made empanada leaks in the oven. Rung 4.
- Chill the filled, crimped empanadas for 15 minutes before baking, so the fat in the dough is properly cold going into the heat, giving a crisper, more defined crust that holds its seal better than one baked directly after assembly.