Beef Empandas

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I was watching Saturday Kitchen on Saturday funnily enough, when I saw the Hairy Bikers come up with this recipe. Luckily I had all the ingredients in the kitchen to go ahead and do this.

For the pastry:

• 450g Plain flour
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 tsp Salt
• 60g Butter
• 60g Lard
• Ice cold water

Pastry is a lot simpler than I imagined so I will probably use this again and not including chilling time only takes about 10 minutes. All you need to do is combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a mixing bowl. Cut the lard and butter into small chunks and add to the bowl, then just rub the ingredients together until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add the water a little at a time until it forms a soft dough. Rest in the fridge for an hour and you should get this:

While this is resting in the fridge you can get on with your filling:

• Olive oil
• 1/2 Beef stock cube
• 400g Beef mince
• 1 Onion
• 1 Green pepper
• 3 Garlic cloves
• 3 tbsp Red wine
• 1/2 tsp Cumin
• 1/2 tsp Paprika
• 1/2 tsp Chilli powder
• 12 Olives sliced
• Salt and Pepper for seasoning
• 1 Beaten egg for brushing pastry

Firstly add some oil to a frying pan and add the stock cube, stirring continuously for 30 seconds. Add the beef and fry until brown. In a separate frying pan add some more oil. Add the onion and green pepper and fry until soft. Add the garlic and cook for a further minute. Next add the wine, cumin, paprika, chilli powder, olives and seasoning and cook for a further minute. Finally add the meat and juices, stir well, and leave to go cold. You should end up with something like this:

Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C. Roll your pastry out to about 5mm thick and cut out circles. For this I used a saucer that was about 4″ diameter and with this amount of pastry I got 10 circles. Brush the beaten egg around the edge of the pastry and fill half of it with your filling. Fold over, crimp the edges and place on a  greased baking tray. As I said I ended up with 10 so there was plenty left over for lunch the following day! Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown. You should end up with what is in the picture at the top.

Claire did some rice with this adding some mushrooms, spring onions and kidney beans which made a nice accompaniment for these empandas.