Cheese Empanadas
This is a nice and simple empanada recipe. Having the sugar in the cheese mix brings out a little sweetness mixed with savory, making this hard to not eat the entire batch of empanadas in one sitting. I blame the devil's lettuce.
Ingredients
Empanada Dough
- 1 1/2 cup masa harina flour
- 1 1/4 cup warm water
- 1/2 tsp salt
Empanada Filling
- 1 1/2 cup crumbled queso fresco
- 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella
- 4 tsp sugar
- 2 green onion finely chopped
Garnish
- shredded cabbage
- sliced tomato
- sour cream
- cilantro
- serrano pepper thinly sliced
- crumbled queso fresco
Instructions
Empanada Filling
- Mix all filling ingredients together. Set aside.
Empanada Dough
- Mix all of the dough ingredients together. You may need to add a little bit more warm water to the dough. The consistency should feel like firm mashed potatoes.
Cheese Empanada Assembly
- Roll the dough into equally sized balls, depending on how big you want your empanadas to be. I made mine fairy large and yielded 6. 8 is a more realistic size, but that's really up to you.
- Using a tortilla press, place 1 dough ball on top of a halved ziplock bag with the other side of the bag over the top, in the center.
- Press until the dough is about 1/8"thick.
- Take off the top ziplock bag. Place 2 heaping tbsp of the cheese filling across the top half of the flattened dough ball.
- Take the bottom half of the ziplock bag and fold over the empanada. Crimp the edges while they are underneath the plastic.
- I like to then roll the crimped edges of the empanadas in a little more to make them more secure. f you want to take it a step farther, crimp the edges with a fork after this step.
- Heat up cooking oil in a skillet over medium high heat. Fry the empanadas in batches, making sure to not overcrowd the pan.
- Fry for 4-5 minutes a side.
- Drain on paper towel.
- Place the empanadas over a bed of shredded cabbage. Top with sour cream, more queso fresco, diced tomato, and cilantro. If you'd like a little heat, add sliced Serrano peppers on top.
