Replace The Ground Beef In Your Empanadas With This Meaty Snack

The perfect empanada is a thing of beauty. Imagine that golden, flaky crust with its crimped edges. You take in the color and half-moon shape before the smell of cumin, onions, meat, and spices hits your nose. The filling is boldly seasoned, a balanced mix of salty and umami flavors, with faint sweetness from the onion, smoky notes from the cook on the pastry, and a dash of heat from other seasonings. Whether filled with chicken, pork, vegetables, or ground beef, a good empanada can be amazing. But if you want to really give it a boost, swap out those traditional fillings and give shredded beef jerky a try.

In Northern Argentina, charqui empanadas are a mainstay. Charqui comes from the Andean language Quechua and means dried meat or jerky. The traditional preparation involves cooking the meat until soft, cutting it, and grinding it. When it's worked long enough, it forms thin, delicate strands like meat cotton candy. Think of the pork floss or ròusōng from Asian cuisine. Season how you'd season any beef empanada. Mixed with onions, tomato paste, or other ingredients that add flavor and moisture, it creates a thick, hearty filling.

Using jerky instead of ground beef offers both unique flavor and texture advantages. Jerky provides more umami and a greater depth of flavor, highlighted by the salty sweetness of its cure, in a way that ground beef can't match. Depending on the jerky you choose, you might add rich smokiness, acidic notes from lime and vinegar, or spicy, peppery flavors.

Empanadas were first created in Portugal and Spain. The name means "to wrap or coat in bread." You can trace the history of empanadas back even further to similar hand pies from the Middle East. The Spanish brought their version to the New World, where they evolved into smaller, handheld treats that became a cornerstone of Argentine cuisine. They became delicious, hearty, working-class food meant to be a meal on the go, not unlike a taco or burrito.

Using beef jerky as a filling is a shortcut to a more enhanced, nuanced flavor. You can get rich, bold taste without braising meat for hours. When it's shredded down to a fine floss, the result in an empanada is more like pulled beef or pulled pork, only more delicate. Though softened, it still has a chew to it and a desirable, meaty texture.

If you want to try adding beef jerky to your empanadas at home, you don't need to struggle using a mortar and pestle to get it down to the right texture. That's a great option if you want a traditional preparation, but if you'd like to save time, you can pulse the jerky in your blender, and it will turn into a light, cottony mass within seconds. If you're already a fan of empanadas and are looking for something a little more adventurous to do with them, give beef jerky a try and see what you think.