Nicole Stephens - DEIB Cooking

Nicole Stephens: So I'm gonna go ahead and get started with putting some oil in here and you probably only need about half a tablespoon. You can already see that the pan is hot. I'm just gonna try to kind of coat the pan a little bit. So I'm gonna get started now that the oil should be hot. I'm gonna go ahead and put the beef in the pan. And I'm just gonna kind of try to cut it up a little bit. So it's not all in one shape. So what we wanna do is make sure that we brown the beef before we do anything with the pastry. So I'm gonna do this until a little bit more of this is brown. And then once that happens, I'll put in the vegetables, I put one on one side and another on the other. I'm just gonna let this kind of sit. So, all right. So now I'm gonna grab some salt and pepper. Just what you would normally use for this amount of beef. And I'm gonna use about, I would say, maybe a teaspoon of cumin. About the same with the garlic powder and a little bit less oregano I, I try to mix this up a little bit. Now, once this is fully browned, I'm gonna taste it, make sure that it taste the way I want it to and it doesn't, then I can add some more seasoning. All right. So our meat is brown and, uh, now we are ready to fill the pastry dough before we do that. I'm gonna take out these bay leaves. So we're gonna go ahead and transfer all of this over to our bowl here. And if you guys are curious, I did add some more seasoning after the fact, I added some more salt and some more cumin. All right, I'm just gonna set my pan aside and now I'm gonna bring my bowl over to my workstation here.

OK. So I'm gonna grab a spoon. I forgot to mention this. You do want a spoon because you're gonna need to fill the shells. So, what I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna go ahead and grab my very, very first shell. I'm gonna go ahead and set it here and while I remember, I'm gonna go ahead and spray my cooking sheet with this olive oil, kind of all over. This is a nonstick cooking sheet but with the egg wash and everything and the puff pastry, these can stick pretty easily still. So that is why I'm using. So let me go ahead and start with just about one spoonful. Now, these are the smaller shells. So you don't wanna put too much in there about one spoonful. One large spoonful should be perfect. So that is all we, we need to have that space around it so that we can fold it and so that there's not a whole bunch of um filling coming out of the sides. So I'm pressing the edges together just like this and this is where the fork comes in handy. So we're gonna really seal these by pressing the prongs of the fork into the edges just like this. And that makes it look really beautiful. Just like an empanadita that you would get at a bakery. Just nice and presentable. All right. So that is what we're gonna do with all of these. I'm just gonna show you on this one. What you're gonna wanna do at this point is take your egg wash and spread it all over. Your empanada and then the final step is gonna be taking a little bit of your salt and just sprinkling that on top. All right guys. So we've finished our batch here. All of these have had their edges pressed with a fork. They've all been glazed with the egg wash and then you'll see that there's just all the salt kind of sprinkled over these. So what we're gonna go ahead and do um, is just stick this in the oven for about 45 minutes and just a reminder that it's at 375 degrees. Now, we put egg wash on these so that they get a really, really nice golden color and that the egg wash really seals those up. All right. So our empanadas are done cooking and as you can see, they are a beautiful golden color. They look very crispy and that salt is still intact on there. These are gonna be so yummy. I'm gonna let them cool down. I hope you guys enjoy this. This is um something I grew up eating. Just living in Panama, Puerto Rico, living in Miami. My mom is Panamanian. So having grown up with empanadas, I've made my own recipe based on what I've experienced. And this is probably one of my staples.