Delicious Grain Free Empanadas

These delicious grain free empanadas are the perfect treat for anyone trying to live a grain-free lifestyle. Eating and living a grain-free lifestyle can be challenging when you don’t find replacements for your favorite foods. That is why I have made it my mission in life to teach and help others who want to follow a grain-free or low carb lifestyle, to find replacements to their favorite foods. These delicious grain free empanadas are a huge hit in my home and I am sure you will love them too.

Living a healthy lifestyle in my opinion is crucial and important, but you don’t need to feel deprived or miss your favorite foods. The key to sticking to a healthy lifestyle is to cook your own food as much as possible, use real food, and find healthy replacements for your favorite “can’t live without” foods.

Which is what we are doing today, a classic family favorite of mine and a very popular Latin American food, found in almost every culture – The Empanada. If you really take note almost every culture and country has some form of this food. It’s the idea of taking dough and filling it with meat, veggies or cheese, then baking or frying it and serving it as a snack, party food, appetizer, breakfast, etc. We can find it in almost every culture, just with a different name – calzone, sambusa, empanada, dumpling, samosa, bureka, etc.

So today’s weekend inspiration recipe is an old family favorite that I grew up eating – empanadas (Chilean style because that’s where my family is from). However the twist here is that the dough is grain-free. Delicious grain-free empanadas.

Of course feel free to fill them with anything you want if you don’t like meat, but these are really good. Another note I must admit is that these do require some extra prep work. So my suggestion is to do it in 2 days as per below directions, make a big batch, and freeze them to have ready when ever your in the mood. Happy Cooking!

ingredients

2 batches of Everything Dough – posted in a few previous posts (avocado pizza and Za’atar bread)

1 lb of ground beef

2 onions

1 tbsp avocado oil

1 can of black pitted olives

3 hard boiled eggs

1/2 a tsp of each of the following: Chili powder, garlic, cumin, paprika, salt

egg wash

Directions

The best way to tackle this recipe is to split the work into 2 days, knowing that you will make about 20 empanadas that you will have to enjoy for weeks to come. I know that normally I make really fast and easy recipes that take very little time to make, however this one is a special treat, and one worth spending the time on.

Remember you can always fill the empanadas with anything you like. Some of my favorites aside from this meat one are pizza sauce and cheese, spinach and feta, sauteed veggies, and of course sweet ones like – chocolate and bananas, or apple and cinnamon.

Prep Work

In order to feel like this recipe is not so labor intensive (I hope I’m no scaring you, as it really is not so bad). I like to make the meat the day before so it has time to properly cool.

For meat preparation, chop onions and saute them in avocado oil. Once translucent you can add ground beef and cook well. Use a spoon or spatula to break meat up like you would for bolognese sauce. Add in spices and mix well. There will be way more onions than meat, which is ok as this is the Chilean way.

Once meat is ready, place in a bowl or container and allow to cool completely. I prefer to make this a day in advance so that it is totally cold. If meat is too warm, when you assemble empanadas dough starts to fall apart.

At this time I also boil up eggs and have them ready for assembly the next day. Now our work is done for today and we can leave the rest for tomorrow. If you’re on a roll, and feeling ambitious, you can make the dough as well in advance and keep in a ziplock back in fridge. Note that for 1 lb of meat you will need to make 2 batches of dough.

Assembly

On day two, we will now put these babies together and bake them. I take the meat, eggs and olives out, placing each in a separate bowl. Note eggs should be peeled and cut into 4 quarters. The key to easy and successful empanada making is have everything out and ready.

Next is getting dough ready. If you have not made it yet, refer to my previous post with everything dough here. If you were ambitious yesterday and made dough you are ready to roll.

Roll out dough between 2 parchment papers so it is about 1/4′ thick and cut into 6″ circles (like in Za’atar bread). Keep doing this until you finish dough. You can roll, cut and assemble as you go, so dough doesn’t dry out. I try to cut out 3-4 circles, fill them, seal them, and then do more.

Now you can fill them. Place about 1 tbsp of meat, 1 quarter hard boiled egg, and 1 olive on half of the dough. Fold dough in half and using your fingers squeeze together dough to seal closed.

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Then place them on a baking sheet, and brush with an egg wash.

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Continue doing this until you finish the filling and dough. Sometimes If I have some dough left I fill them with sauce and cheese. Kids love the pizza fillings and they are great for school lunches.

Bake at 350F for 15 minutes. This will half bake them so you can freeze them and re-bake again without over cooking them. If you want to eat them right away then bake for 20-25 minutes in total until golden brown.

Remove from oven and allow to cool completely before freezing. I usually wrap them in parchment paper to seperate them and place them in a ziplock to freeze.

Next time you don’t know what to make for dinner, just pull a few of these out, warm them up, and serve with a nice big salad. Dinner made easy.