• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Traditional Cooking School by GNOWFGLINS

Dish up the simple joy of healthy, down-home foods your family will LOVE… tonight.

Join 12,000+ families served since 2010!

  • Join Now
  • About
    • About Wardee & TCS
    • Our Team
    • FAQs & Help
    • Contact
  • Recipes
  • Blog
    • Recipes
    • Archives
  • Podcast
    • #AskWardee
    • Know Your Food with Wardee (retired)
  • Shop
    • Bible-Based Cooking Program
    • Print Textbooks
    • eBooks & eCourses
    • Recommended Tools & Supplies
    • More Books We Love
    • Complete Idiot’s Guide To Fermenting Foods
      • Errata
  • Login
You are here: Home » Food Preparation » Recipes » Breads, Muffins, & Crackers » Empanadas

Learn how to make your own sourdough starter... get it going in just 5 minutes! Click here to download FREE instructions!

Empanadas

We only recommend products and services we wholeheartedly endorse. This post may contain special links through which we earn a small commission if you make a purchase (though your price is the same).

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In the Sourdough eCourse, my friend Christina taught us a sourdough variation of the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. She calls it the “bucket method.” She really does make it in a bucket, and it is super easy. Not to mention versatile; she shows us how to make loaves and logs, and also english muffins, pita bread, and cinnamon rolls. eCourse members have been trying other things with the dough, too. Tara, from the Keep It Real blog, used the “bucket dough” to make these beautiful empanadas. She’s even got an informative little video to show how she rolls them up. I can totally relate to her reverse cooking/planning method, as that is how I work, too. Enjoy! –Wardee

Sometimes the best meals are created through a lack of planning, limited ingredients, and not much time. Doesn’t exactly sound right, does it? For the most part we equate delicious, nutritious, and easy meals with a lot of careful planning and specific shopping. I tend to work backward. I collect high quality, nutrient dense, and interesting ingredients and then figure out a way to make them into a meal everyone will enjoy. Not an easy task for a family of five with many different tastes. Though I do enjoy the challenge.

On this night all the elements aligned just right and out came this amazing meal that everyone loved! Around 2pm, I realized that I didn’t have a dinner planned. Usually I can find something in the fridge that can easily be turned into a meal, but we were pretty cleaned out of leftovers. So I took a look at what we did have. Some frozen grass fed ground beef, onions, peppers, tomatoes, spices, cheese, and a no-knead bucket of sourdough in the fridge.

I thought of the Nourishing Traditions recipe for empanadas. I made these once, and while they came out okay, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the structure of the dough. It left a pocket of meat in the middle and a lot of hard crust around the outside edge that was just peeled off and discarded. I thought I might be able to improve the form of this meat pocket a bit to suit our tastes. I took the frozen meat out to defrost and removed the bucket of dough from the fridge. About fours hours later I was ready to get on with it. From the previous experience I also realized that the meat filling should be cooled a bit before trying to stuff it in soft fragile dough. I got to work on the meat filling.

Now, the beauty of these baked ‘burritos’ is that the filling ideas are endless. This time, I went with a Mexican flavor. First, I browned an onion and green bell pepper in a cast iron skillet with some lard. Once that was browned, I added the grass fed ground beef. Cooked until done and then started seasoning. I threw in some fresh lime juice, chopped fresh tomatoes, garlic, cumin, red pepper, salt and pepper, and kept tasting it and adjusting till the flavor was just right.

Sorry — it’s not specific. That’s how I cook when I’m not following a recipe. Once the meat was flavored to my liking, I started preparing the dough. At this point, the bucket of dough had sat out for at least several hours. It was softer, not as chilled, and had expanded a bit. I took out a big handful of dough and put it on a well floured counter. This time I used unbleached white wheat flour. The better option would have been some whole wheat sprouted flour, but again, I was working with what I had on hand.

Here’s the folding technique: Pat out the dough (probably about a small to medium loaf amount) to a rough rectangle. Then cut it in fours. Use a rolling pin to roll out a piece to another rough rectangle. Pick up the dough and stretch it out more if needed. Then transfer it to a clean surface (brushing off excess flour). Sprinkle cheese down the center. Put about a third cup of meat filling at the bottom portion of the rectangle. Fold the long sides up. Start at the bottom and carefully start rolling the burrito up while slightly pulling it length wise. Be sure the stretch the end part of the dough wide enough to stretch mostly across the length of the burrito so that you don’t have a thick amount of dough in one spot. Pinch the seam together and place seam side down on a baking tray.

The amount of dough I had in my bucket made enough burritos to fill two of these trays. I baked these for 20 minutes in a preheated oven at 450 degrees. Since the filling was already cooked, I wanted a high temp oven to quickly cook the dough and give a nice crisp outside. After 20 minutes, I took them out and brushed the tops with coconut oil. I put the tray back in the oven for 5 minutes. I let them cool for about 10 minutes before serving.

These turned out incredibly delicious! I served them cut in half with sides of kefir cream, lacto fermented bean dip, avocado, and marinated tomatoes. Reheating the leftovers was very easy. Cut in half and stick in the toaster oven on ‘bake’ for about 5 minutes. Tastes the same as fresh out of the oven.

This week I am planning on making another batch with an Italian theme. Mozzarella cheese, local sausage, and homemade pizza sauce. Yum!

Back to Wardee: Interested in the bucket dough? The Sourdough eCourse never closes — you can enroll any time. Come on by and learn the “bucket method” from Christina, too! 😀

We only recommend products and services we wholeheartedly endorse. This post may contain special links through which we earn a small commission if you make a purchase (though your price is the same).

Posted in: Breads, Muffins, & Crackers Food Preparation Main Dishes Recipes Sourdough

About Tara

Tara lives in Idaho with her husband and three kids, including one high schooler, one middle schooler, and one 9 year old son with autism who they're homeschooling. She strives to "keep it real" by using natural, whole, sustainably raised food. In the past year, she has learned to ferment many foods and beverages, soak grains, sprout, use healthy traditional fats, and seek out pastured meats. She and her family rent barn and pasture space to keep milk goats and chickens. Tara blogs at Keep it Real.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Tiffany says

    August 30, 2010 at 10:59 am

    Tara, you are awesome!!! I had the idea to make these, but I haven’t made my dough yet (waiting for my azurestandard order to come it). Thanks for sharing this with us!

    Reply
  2. Millie says

    August 30, 2010 at 11:10 am

    YUM. Tara, these look great. I love the way you rolled them.

    Reply
  3. Jed says

    August 30, 2010 at 11:22 am

    Local eateries here in Buffalo serve a thing called an eppie roll–one of my favorites. I kinda thought this dough would work for making them but wasn’t sure. But after seeing what you did (great little video too, it really helps seeing things sometimes) I can’t wait to give them a try and make some of my own “rolls”.

    Thanks Tara!

    Reply
  4. Christina says

    August 30, 2010 at 11:35 am

    Tara~ Thanks for a great video, can’t wait to try it 🙂
    ~Christina

    Reply
  5. Katie Riddle says

    August 30, 2010 at 12:18 pm

    This looks *amazing.* I love empanadas; great idea making it with sourdough. Thanks for sharing the recipe!

    Reply
  6. Toni says

    August 30, 2010 at 1:37 pm

    This looks *amazing.* I love empanadas; great idea making it with sourdough. Thanks for sharing the recipe!

    Reply
  7. Erin from Long Island says

    August 31, 2010 at 1:18 am

    This is great! I love the video and am thrilled to find someone who cooks like me, ass backwards! I am making some version of these this week for sure

    Reply
  8. Elizabeth says

    August 31, 2010 at 9:22 am

    Tara, I tried these last night and they were great! I already had some “no-knead bucket bread” in the frig and a pound of already-browned ground beef in the freezer. I added a little onion and some canned salsa to the beef when I warmed it up.

    Thanks for sharing this with us!

    Reply
    • Tara says

      August 31, 2010 at 9:27 am

      Elizabeth, that’s awesome! Did the folding technique work ok for you? So excited that someone used my idea! 😉

      Reply
  9. Tara says

    August 31, 2010 at 9:28 am

    Thanks for all the kind words! The video was a bit of an after thought. But I realized that a visual to how I was folding them up would be good, so I grabbed my daughter and had her do a quick film for me.

    Reply
  10. Leesie says

    August 31, 2010 at 4:31 pm

    This looks great! Thank you! I am going to try this very soon as I have all of these ingredients on hand including my bucket of dough that has been out on the counter for a few hours!

    Reply
  11. Tara says

    September 2, 2010 at 1:44 pm

    Last night I made these again with an italian twist. I made some fresh Italian tomato sauce, mixed it with local italian pork sausage and used mozzarella cheese. Oh yum! Delish!

    Reply
  12. Carolyn says

    September 4, 2010 at 2:23 pm

    Oh Wow these sound good. We are going to give this one a try later in the week. One question though, could you tell me how you make your fermented bean dip?

    Reply
  13. Maggie says

    July 6, 2011 at 5:41 pm

    Oh goodness, I think my husband will love these! When I was strictly concerned only for our budget, I learned how to make empanadas with refrigerated biscuit dough. I feel guilty still serving them. This will be a great alternative since empanadas are probably one of my husband’s favorite items. He requests them often!

    Reply
  14. Kelsey says

    November 3, 2011 at 7:59 pm

    Yum! I’m super excited – I was looking for someone who had used the bucket dough for empanadas, and this is perfect! I will be making these next week, served with some sour cream. Thank you!!

    Reply
  15. Kelsey says

    November 9, 2011 at 8:50 pm

    Okay, I just made these and they are GOOD!! More like a chimichanga that’s baked instead of fried, but whatever you call them, they were tasty! I think I’ll try to roll out my dough even thinner next time – it was tough to get all of the dough cooked all the way. But even though some of it was slightly doughy, they were delicious and filling. Thank you so much for the recipe!!

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Hi and Welcome!

I’m Wardee Harmon and I help Christian families who know they should eat healthy but are tired of complicated, time-consuming, weird-tasting, and unsustainable “healthy” diets…

…who want to look and feel better, save time and money, and have more energy for enjoying family life and serving Him fully!… like I was. Click here for more…

Recently on the Blog

  • Fizzy Apple Cider Switchel (VAD)
  • VitaClay Review & Buyer’s Guide
  • How to Make Healthy Cookies #AskWardee 006
  • Bean and Barley Soup (Instant Pot, Stove Top)
  • Soaked Spelt Banana Bread (VAD)
  • Ancient Grains 101
  • How to Heal Digestive Issues Naturally (Leaky Gut, SIBO, IBS, Celiac & more)
  • How To Meal Plan In 4 Easy Steps (KYF103)
  • Debunking 4 Sourdough Myths (& How To Overcome Them)
  • How To Use A Pressure Cooker 101

Recently Commented

  • Danielle on Naturally Sweetened & Nourishing Chocolate Marshmallows
  • Stacey Hingson on Naturally Sweetened & Nourishing Chocolate Marshmallows
  • Lori Gintner on The Connection Between Mental Illness & Candida (+ why you need more than anti-fungals)
  • Tiranga on Homemade Sauerkraut In A Stoneware Crock
  • ronald ryan on 10 Tips For Using A Gas Grill As An Oven
  • Julia on How To Make Sour Cream
  • KM on The Best Sourdough English Muffins (Traditional Recipe)

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Before Footer

g-NOWF-glinz

…are what we eat! God’s Natural, Organic, Whole Foods, Grown Locally, In Season.

We love working with other Christian families who love good food and want to eat according to God’s design…

Not only because we believe it’s the healthiest way, but because we want to give Him glory for creating good food as the best medicine!

Learn more about GNOWFGLINS here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOcH27DM1dI

Eat God’s Way Cooking Program

Our Eat God’s Way cooking program is for Christian families who know they should eat healthy but are tired of complicated, time-consuming, weird-tasting, and unsustainable “healthy” diets…

…who want to look and feel better, save time and money, and have more energy for enjoying family life and serving Him fully!

Join 12,000+ families served since 2010! Learn more here…

Copyright © 2025 Traditional Cooking School by GNOWFGLINS • About • Help • Privacy • Partners