Baked Meat-Filled Empanadas (Empanadas al Horno)
Updated May 20, 2026
Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times
- Total Time
- 1 hour
- Rating
- Comments
- Read comments
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Ingredients
1 ½ tablespoons lard
1 cup fine-chopped onion
½ pound lean beef, minced
Salt
fresh black pepper
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
Tabasco or other hot sauce to taste
Empanada dough (see recipe)
2 hard-cooked eggs, sliced
12 pitted cured black olives, sliced
30 raisins
1 large egg, lightly beaten with 1 tablespoon water
Preparation
- Step 1
Melt lard in a 10- to 12-inch skillet. Add onion and sauté on medium until it barely starts to color. Add beef. Cook until ingredients are lightly browned. Add salt and pepper to taste, cumin, paprika and hot sauce. Set aside. Heat oven to 400 degrees.
- Step 2
Roll dough as thin as possible. Cut 6-inch circles. Scraps can be re-rolled one time. Place some meat mixture on one half of each circle, leaving a ½-inch border around filling. Top with a slice of egg, some olive pieces and a few raisins. Brush egg on empty side of circle, fold dough over to make a half-circle and crimp edges. Traditional squared empanadas can be made by folding an inch or so of each of the pointed ends of the half-circle over to make straight sides, then folding up the rounded bottom to square off the empanada.
- Step 3
Arrange empanadas on a baking sheet. Squared empanadas should be placed with folded side down. Bake 10 minutes. Turn empanadas over, bake 5 minutes longer, until lightly browned on both sides. Allow to cool briefly before serving.
Private Notes
Comments
As a student in Santiago over 30 years ago, a morning highlight was the hot, fragrant empanadas a woman would bring on a huge tray into the class area, selling them to an anxious group. These are tasty but next time I´ll add capers, more cumin, and maybe more onion. It is important to get the dough rolled out really thin.
Chilean here. The best empanadas have more meat and less onion. Some businesses usually add lots of onion and less meat to save in manufacture costs, however, people will notice that and usually won't buy again from them, even if it's cheaper. The problem is that you don't know until you start eating it.
The dough was so dry that I couldn't roll it out. Don't know what I did wrong, but it took a lot of fiddling to get it into shape.
Big fan of this recipe, but agree with other commenters on the meat / onion ratio, that was something noticeable when visiting Chile a few years ago. All in all, though, this worked out pretty well. Ended up making 38 minis with the same amount of dough.
Made This with butter instead of lard and it was perfect