Quick and Easy Empanadas

Submitted by startnover

"This is such a simple recipe w/ just a few ingredients I almost always have on hand. It's a quick dinner w/ a green salad. You can double this easily for make ahead lunches."

 

• Ready In: 45mins
• Ingredients: 8
• Yields: 12 empanadas

ingredients

• 453.59 g ground beef
• 1 garlic clove
• 4.92 ml salt
• 425.24 g can fresh cut corn, drained
• 118.29 ml chopped onion
• 226.79 g grated cheddar cheese
• 236.59 ml salsa
• 2 (907.18 g) can large refrigerated biscuits (I use buttermilk, and you may only use 1 and 1/2 cans depending on how full you make them)

directions

1. Brown the ground beef in a frying pan adding the salt and pepper just before done.
2. Let the beef cool.
3. In a large bowl mix the corn, onions, cheese, and salsa, then add the cooled beef mixing carefully so not to break up all the cheese.
4. Roll the biscuits out flat to about 2-1/2 times their size.
5. Place approx 1/3 cup filling on one side of the center of the circle lengthwise.
6. Fold the dough over the filling like a turn over and crimp the edges like a pie crust. Be careful not to tear the dough, and to seal the edges completely or your filling will come out! depending on how much filling is used will determine how many biscuits you will use.
7. Place on slightly greased cookie sheet and bake at 375 till lightly browned.

Reviews

[Sirpezy]

I've made these as written & last night made them vegetarian w/ refried beans, garlic, salsa & cheese. Next I am going to make them for breakfast w/ sausage, cheese, potatoes & eggs. They freeze great! Thank you for a yummy recipe & wonderful idea w/ endless filling possibilities!!

 

[beckyday]

We thought these were very good. Very easy. Instead of the biscuits, I used a box of refrigerator pie dough and put some filling in a quadrant. Put the other dough over the top and used a pizza cutter to cut into 4 large pieces, then crimped the edges. They come out great. Had lots of filling left so will use again or will make Nachos or something. I would definitely make these again.

 

[jodieh77]

My 8yr old daughter and I made this recipe for her class during their study of Mexico. We found the mixture very easy to put together and tasty too. Instead of using the biscuits we found out that our grocery store makes empanada dough already cut out and flattened into shape ready to take the filling. This must have made all the difference because our dough came together very easy. The overall review from the class full of 8 year olds was great! They loved it! Will definately add this to our family recipie box.

 

[Heavens Kitchen]

This was one of my worst cooking disasters ever! To be fair, others have given good reviews, so maybe this would have worked out better if I'd used different brands of ingredients. I don't know. The large biscuit dough I used was definitely not large enough to hold anywhere near 1/3 cup of filling, so what I ended up with was more like little appetizers rather than something you'd serve as a meal. The salsa made the mix too watery and it kept leaking out, so I'd recommend draining the salsa first, or perhaps adding it to the meat in the pan and letting the excess water/juice evaporate before trying to fill the dough. And perhaps it was the brand of biscuit dough that I used, but I found it incredibly difficult to work with. It was so oily that I had a very hard time getting the edges to stay sealed. Even when I crimped them with a fork, they just kept opening right back up. The filling itself was good, and I think I might like this made using bread dough. I think if I'd made some bread dough in my bread machine and used that instead of the biscuit dough, this might have turned out much better (and healthier, too). I had doubled the recipe, thinking that I was going to get to put some of these up for later, but this was so much trouble that I ended up stopping halfway through and freezing the rest of the mix to use in a Tex-Mex casserole or something. Maybe I'll make the bread dough and use the filling for that. I definitely won't be tyring this again with biscuit dough!

 

[AmyMCGS]

Good and easy. My 5 year-old and husband both liked them, and my 1 year-old enjoyed the filling eaten with a spoon.