Empanada of the Day!

Empanada of the Day! is a new blog segment that was originally going to be titled Empanada of the Week! but since I only have a few weeks left and more than 3 empanadas to try I've changed the title. However, I won't be sampling an empanada every day for the next three weeks. Don't get excited!

I love street food. To me, street food is like 'Fair Food' but more accessible (the Fair only happens once a year), and usually cheaper (of course that depends upon what street you happen to be). And, yes, street food is probably not prepared in the most hygienic way possible. If that is a problem for you, you should not eat street food. But, you'll be missing out on some tasty foods that are part of cultural traditions.

Almost every culture that I know of has some sort of a 'hand pie' or dumpling. They are called pasties (think Irish, not Las Vegas), or piroges or cha siu bao--here they are called empanadas or pastelitos.

Empanadas come in all price ranges. Some of the ones that I will review will not technically be street food since you must enter a bakery to obtain them. But mostly they will be from the street.

Most of the street vendors are outside of a colmado (corner store). They have a cart that has a display area and a large deep pot for frying the empanadas.


They usually look something like this. This one is located across the street and up the block from our apartment. I have not had one of their empanadas yet, but I will in the future.

I wanted to begin with the place where I frequent most. It is on the same side as us and at the opposite end of the block from the one shown above. Unfortunately, I do not have a photo of their stand. Maybe I'll post the photo of their stand when I post the empanada from the other place, just to keep things interesting.

Anyway, when I decided to create these blog posts, I only took a photo of the outside of the empanada. I later decided to slice the empanada in half so that you could see the filling as well. I'm comparing styles, flavors, filling amounts, all of it.

For those of you who are food blog haters (Hez), sorry about that. You might want to just ignore all future posts that are titled Empanada of the Day!

The empanada that I have eaten several times from this stand is the salsa pizza. I have never been there when the empanadas were hot out of the fryer. As with many foods, I think empanadas with cheese in them (this one has cheese)are better when they are warm or hot. Some of them have been slightly warm, but never hot. However, they are close, and the most reasonable in my area at 25 pesos (about 67 cents).


I left the paper bag under the empanada since that is how they are served, in a small paper bag with a napkin. The empanadas from this stand have a crust that is somewhere between pie dough and thin pizza dough. You can see that this one was deep fat fried to bubbling perfection. The filling in their salsa pizza empanada is basically pizza sauce and mozzarella or some other shredded white cheese. It is not the best empanada that I've ever had, but it often hits the spot when I'm walking home with groceries or the mail and I need a snack/lunch to tide me over until dinner.

I hope you have enjoyed my first Empanada of the Day!