Sweet Potato Empanadas

I’ve cooked a few new and yummy things in the past couple months but got lazy with posting about them. I’ll try to catch up over the next week or so.

First: empanadas! I made these for Recipe Club back in June. The theme was to bring something that represented your ethnicity but I cheated a bit (and so did everyone else). I decided to try empanadas since I now have a Hispanic last name, and went with sweet potatoes since they are a big crop in my home state of North Carolina.

I made two different sweet potato fillings, and two kinds of dough — one homemade, and one store-bought. Both fillings had green onion, so I don’t actually know which one that is in the bowl in the photo — I’m guessing it’s the first since I don’t see any cheese. So these are actually a combination of three recipes:

• Chili-Lime Sweet Potato Taquitos for one filling
• Sweet Potato Empanadas for the other filling (with goat cheese and green onions)
• Spicy Empanadas with Cilantro Cream for the dough

I think the dough in the photo above is a refrigerated pie crust, rolled out and cut into circles. The pie crust had a smoother texture but it was also drier and crumbled more easily, while the handmade dough held together more and tasted better. To be fair, I didn’t have time to let the frozen pie crust completely thaw before rolling it out, so that probably had a lot to do with the crumbling. But if you have the time, definitely go for the homemade dough.

These were some of the best-looking empanadas, and by that I mean they were some of the few that weren’t bursting at the seams. I definitely had a tendency to overfill these things, and the majority looked like the lower two in the photo above — my pretty seal and fork indentations split by the filling trying to ooze out. So maybe I lost some style points there, but oh well.

Both fillings were good, but the one with goat cheese, pecans, and green onions was the better of the two in my opinion because it had stronger flavors. Overall, I was happy with how they turned out. Empanadas are way easier to make than I realized!