Galician Flat Pies with a Pork Filling
Air Travel article brought to you by Scott James
Somehow when you do a little research on the cuisine of an individual country it is quite easy to come up almost with a common theme, a common name for the food for that country. Such as English food, German food but when you consider Spanish food or if you wish to be a bit more accurate about how you look at it, food and recipes that originate from Spain there is a very convincing argument that would say it’s not that simple.
The reason for this is that you could quite easily argue that technically there is no such thing as Spanish food and the reason being for this is that Spain is an amalgam of its constituent parts that is to say it could be described as a political construct which is made up of disparate groups with their own languages, cultures, cuisines etc. These autonomous regions have been slowly amalgamated through a number of different processes throughout history but have all kept their own distinctive features.
The number of autonomous different regions that form what we would nowadays refer to as Spain is 17; they all have their own linguistic variations of the language, in some cases it’s a different sub language entirely and as well as their own cultures most definitely have their own individual cuisines.
One of those autonomous regions comprises the north-western province of Galicia. Galicia is surrounded on two sides by the Atlantic Ocean and it is pretty understandable to think that for a region that has such an involvement with the sea, its cuisine would also be heavily influenced by the sea.
The above having been said not all of Galicia’s finest recipes are all seafood based and the region can lay claim to quite a variety of dishes all of which are most definitely worth investigating further.
Lets top talking about the food and get down to business. Let’s eat!
So the ingredients we would need would be as follows:
20 g of fresh yeast or 1 teaspoon of easy blend dried (active dry) yeast.
350 g of strong white flour.
125 g of corn meal,, “masa harina” or finely ground “polenta”.
? tbsp salt
Generous 1/3 cup of white wine.
50 g of lard or vegetable fat.
8 tablespoons of olive oil
1 medium egg, lightly beaten
Water to bind the dough
1 medium egg, lightly beaten to seal and glaze the Empanada.
Again the name of the game here is preparation. Take the yeast with about three tablespoons of hand-hot water and mix it all together to a paste. Take the flour and corn meal and pour into a large bowl and add the salt, the wine, the lard the olive oil, the egg and the yeast paste and add enough water to make it all come together into a soft but not too sticky dough.
Still this mixture well and then start to pull it together with your hands. If there is any dried flower left in the bowl and add a touch more to bring it all together. The thing to remember here is if the dough is too dry it would be too difficult to roll out thinly later on.
Take the dough and knead it together for a couple of minutes until it is smooth and well mixed. Then take the dough put it back into a bowl and cover with cling film or plastic wrap. The important bit here is that you should let the dough rise for at least an hour or until it has doubled in size.
Decide upon what filling you want to include within the empanada and bring everything together. Take out half of your dough and roll it out until it’s about approximately 5 mm thick. Oil your baking sheet and lay this dough on top of it.
Now we turn on attention to getting the filling and in this particular case looking to take a fairly basic pork filling. For our purposes here we are going to need the following ingredients:
150 ml of olive oil
450 g pork loin cuts into fine strips
4 onions finely sliced
1 Red Pepper
1 Green Pepper
2 Garlic cloves – crushed
1 tbsp sweet smoked paprika
? tsp dried oregano
2 tbsp tomato puree (in paste form)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper.
As with all these recipes thing you do is heat your olive oil and take this and add your pork strips. Now be sensible here and don’t add them all at once and allow them to brown slightly and then when ready take them and remove them from the pan.
In much the same way that you cook the pork strips cook the onion in the same way; that is to say gently until the onion is itself almost transparent or has a slight golden touch to it.
Next up is to add the peppers to the onion and continue cooking until these too are also soft. Re introduce the pork strips and take the paprika and the garlic and add these to the mixture and cook for a while so that the ingredients start to blend in with each other and then add the oregano and the tomato pur?e.
Finally season with salt and pepper to taste.
Next take your filling and spread the filling evenly leaving about a 2 cm margin around the age of the dough. Brush the edge of the dough with a little beaten egg.
Take the rest of you at the road at approximately the same size as your original piece and lay this on top of your filling. Take the top and the bottom pieces of dough and start to pinch the edges together and then twist the dough over to make a rope like texture around the edge.
Take the remainder of your beaten egg and brush this all over the empanada and then take a fork and pierce the top of the empanada all over with little holes.
Leave the empanada to rest for about 10 minutes and then leak this in a halt often for between 20 to 30 minutes or depending on your oven the crust is really crisp and golden.
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