Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you’ll notice that our dishes tend to segue into one another – the leftovers from one meal will often inspire the next, potstickers will lead to vegetarian dumplings, or a technique that we tried on Thursday will be reworked into something new on Sunday.

Such is the case with this dish – the saved fat from Römertopf pork ribs a couple of weeks ago went into the pastry for our curry puffs, and that pastry then inspired us to try our hand at empanadas.

As our good friend and neighbour Marcela is Argentinian, I was keen to make a reasonable attempt at these, so I was delighted to find this recipe with video from the old SBS Food Safari series. I followed the filling instructions quite closely, then wrapped the meat in our homemade pastry.

Pastry:

• 600g plain (AP) flour
• ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
• 112g lard or leftover fat from a roast or meat bake (or substitute more butter)
• 112g butter
• 225ml cold water

Filling:

• 1 tablespoon light olive oil (or other vegetable oil)
• 60g butter
• 100g onions, diced
• 100g spring onions, finely chopped
• ½ teaspoon chilli powder, to taste (I used mild ancho chilli powder)
• 500g beef mince
• 125ml (½ cup) water (original recipe used beef stock)
• 1½ tablespoons sugar
• fine sea salt to taste
• ½ teaspoon sweet paprika
• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• pinch ground cloves
• green olives, pitted and chopped
• sultanas
• 2 hardboiled free range eggs, chopped coarsely
• ground cumin

Note: the original recipe for the filling makes double this amount – we only used half of it, so I’ve provided reduced quantities above. We froze our excess filling (it defrosted perfectly a couple of weeks later).

1. Make the pastry first – put the flour into a large mixing bowl and stir in the salt. Rub in the lard and butter, then add in the cold water and knead briefly to combine. Wrap in plastic and rest in the fridge until needed.

2. Make the filling next – heat the oil and butter in large frying pan and fry the onions and spring onions until soft. Add the beef and stir to break it up and brown it a little, then add the chilli powder, paprika, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, salt and water. Cook over a low heat until the liquid and fat have separated from the meat. Check for seasoning and adjust as required.

2. This next step is optional – the original recipe uses the cooked meat from the step above as the completed filling. We scooped the meat out with a slotted spoon, then poured the residual liquid into an oil separator. We poured just the stock back into the pan and cooked it down to a thick caramel glaze, which we then stirred through the meat.

The flavoured fat (mostly butter) that was left in the separator was kept for brushing the tops of the empanadas prior to baking…

Allow the filling to cool before assembling the empanadas (a double quantity is shown below)…

3. Preheat the oven to 200C with fan. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface, then using a small saucer as a template, cut out circles of dough. In the middle of each circle, place a generous spoonful of filling, topped with a few pieces of green olive and hardboiled egg, a sprinkle of sultanas, and a pinch of ground cumin…

4. Fold the pastry in half and pinch and crimp the edges together. Place on a parchment lined baking tray. When all the empanadas are made, brush the tops with either melted butter, or with the residual fat saved from the meat. Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden brown.

The original recipe uses shortcrust pastry – but I like the flakiness of our version. The filling is fabulous – the meat is slightly sweet, but still savoury, and the green olives and egg seem to balance out the sultanas perfectly…

So what was the verdict? Marcela, and more importantly, Marcela’s mum, liked these a lot. As did Pete and Big Boy (there’s no way we’d get sultanas in a savoury pastie past Small Man), so it’s definitely one to make again.

I can’t wait to see if this recipe segues into something else – I still have some of the leftover fat in the fridge, so it might!

Edit: Actually, it did. I added the leftover fat to another batch of pastry, and made more empanadas with the defrosted filling. I eggwashed the second batch rather than brushing with butter, and they baked to a deep golden brown.

I seem to have all my good bread ideas at ridiculous hours of the morning.

A couple of days ago, I was lying in bed at 5am, woken by my delightful peri-menopausal body clock, trying to decide what to do with the mountain of dough that had been proving overnight on the bench. Knotted rolls came to mind, so I put on my fluffy pink slippers and crept down the hallway to the kitchen.

Lovely Jane wrote recently about the joy of early morning bread baking, and she’s so right – there’s something incredibly peaceful and comforting about playing with dough in the quiet hour or two before anyone else is awake. It’s just not the best time for food photography.

As a result, I made these rolls twice – the second time during the day – so that I could take some decent photos of the finished rolls and the shaping process.

I began with my standard shaping dough recipe (most recently used in our cookie cutter rolls), but the technique should work with most bread doughs, providing they’re not too wet. A double batch is shown in the photos below:

• 300g ripe, active sourdough starter (fed at a ratio of one cup water to one cup flour – for more information on how I feed my starter Priscilla, please see our tutorial here)
• 580g cold water
• 500g bakers/bread flour
• 500g remilled semolina flour (Semola Rimacinata di Grano Duro – if you can’t find it, substitute 00 flour or more bakers flour, and reduce the water to 550g)
• 18g fine sea salt
• fine semolina for dusting the bench and dough

1. In a large mixing bowl, use a clean hand to mix the starter, water, bakers flour, remilled semolina flour and salt together to form a shaggy dough. Scrape your fingers off and cover the bowl with clingfilm. Allow the dough to rest for half an hour.

2. After the rest time, give the dough a quick knead in the bowl – literally just a minute or so. Cover it again and allow to rest until it has doubled in size – depending on your starter and the temperature in your kitchen, that could take anywhere from 4 to 10 hours.

3. Dust the bench with fine semolina, and turn out the proved dough.  Give it a few folds, then cut the dough into 235g pieces (you’ll end up with 8 rolls).

4. Dust the bench with more fine semolina. Roll each piece of dough into a long log, ensuring that all sides are well coated in semolina.

5. Fold the dough into a charity ribbon shape…

6. Bring one end up and over, and into the middle of the loop…

7. Tuck the other end underneath into the bottom of the loop…

 8. Place the rolls on a parchment lined baking tray, cover with a tea towel and allow them to prove a second time. Preheat the oven to 240C with fan.

9. Once the rolls have had their second rise, spritz the top of each roll with a little water, then put the tray into the oven, reducing the temperature to 220C with fan at the same time.

10. Bake the rolls for 20 minutes, then rotate the tray(s) and turn the oven down to 175C with fan. Allow a further 15-20 minutes baking time until the rolls are golden brown and hollow when tapped on the base (photo below shows the underside of the roll).

Pete was very taken with the look of these – he found them sculptural and dynamic. He particularly liked the “movement” cracks in the crust (I didn’t point out that they were actually a result of dodgy dough handling on my part)…

My double batch of dough made six knotted rolls…

…eight rosette rolls (using my bread stamp)…

…and three baguettes…

A crumb shot from the knotted roll…

I was very chuffed with how these turned out – sourdough isn’t the best medium for this type of shaping, but these rolls held their definition well.

If more intricate dough braiding takes your fancy, you might be interested in some of our earlier (non-sourdough) posts:

• Braided Loaves
• More Braided Loaves
• Winston Knot Tutorial

Be warned though, it can be very addictive!

To all my vegetarian and vegan readers – thank you for being so lovely.

You pop in to visit our omnivorous and occasionally very carnivorous blog, but you’re always so gracious – I’ve never had a single judgmental or proselytising comment. This recipe was developed just for you.

I couldn’t find a vegetarian dumpling recipe that wasn’t tofu-based, so I played around with one of my own. It uses the same seasoning mix as our original dumpling filling.

• 300g wombok (also known as Chinese cabbage or Napa cabbage)
• 6 – 8 dried shiitake mushrooms
• 1 walnut-sized knob of young ginger, peeled and finely diced
• a small bunch of garlic chives
• 3 fat spring onions
• 1 small bunch of baby bok choy
• 2 – 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons Shao Hsing rice wine
• 2 teaspoons light soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons oyster sauce (see note below)
• ½ teaspoon white sugar
• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1 packet of dumpling skins (30 – 35 pieces)

Note: I know oyster sauce isn’t vegetarian, but it’s worth using if your personal ideology permits, as it adds a wonderful flavour to the dish. If not, try substituting vegetarian oyster sauce, or more soy sauce.

1. Chop the vegetables and ginger finely. Soak the shiitake mushrooms in cold water for at least half an hour, or until softened. Cut off the hard stems, and dice the softened flesh. Combine the rice wine, soy, oyster sauce (or vegetarian equivalent), sugar, salt and sesame oil in a small bowl.

2. Heat the vegetable oil in a wok, and fry the mushrooms, ginger and vegetables for a few minutes until softened. Add the sauce mix and continue to fry until the mushrooms are cooked through and the greens have wilted.

3. Allow the filling to cool. As you can see from the photo below, the greens will cook down substantially.

4. Using either square or round skins, add a teaspoonful of filling and fold or pleat to enclose. Use either the wonton folding technique shown here, or the half-moon pleating one from our original post.

The vegetarian dumplings take a bit of practice, as the filling is less compact than its meat equivalent. It’s important to try and get as much air out of the finished dumpling as possible, or it could burst during the cooking process.

5. The dumplings can be cooked in a variety of ways – we boiled the ones in the top photo (they were our test batch) and deep-fried the ones in the photo below. I loved the deep-fried ones, but Pete preferred them boiled. We didn’t try pan-frying them (as we did with our original ones), but that should work as well.

I pleated the remainder of the filling into little parcels and sent them across the road to our neighbours Shaun and Michelle. They loved them!

PS. A funny story for you – my friend Moo walked into his local supermarket in Adelaide and asked for gourmet mushrooms. The young man working in the fruit and veg section called out..”Hey Joe! Do we have any more of those shit-take mushrooms?”