Empanada de pino: Chile's baked beef empanada

Overview

The empanada de pino is a large baked pastry, folded into a plump rectangle with a crimped edge, and its whole character is decided by what the Chileans call the pino: a filling of beef and onion in roughly equal measure, cooked down with cumin and paprika until dark and savoury, then chilled so it sets firm before it is wrapped. The best versions use beef hand-diced with a knife rather than minced, so the meat keeps some bite. Buried in the pino, almost as a rule, are three things: a slice of hard-boiled egg, a single black olive and a raisin or two. Finding all three is part of eating one.

This is the baked empanada — de horno, from the oven — and that matters, because the fried empanada is usually a different filling (cheese, or seafood on the coast). When a Chilean says empanada without qualification around the September holidays, this is the one they mean.

It is fair to be plain about the wider picture: the empanada is not Chilean in origin and not unique to Santiago. It arrived with Spanish colonisation, a descendant of the folded savoury pastries of Spain, and versions of it are eaten across the Spanish-speaking world. What is distinctly Chilean is the pino itself — that particular beef-and-onion filling with its egg, olive and raisin — and the word, whose origin is debated but is generally traced to Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche. The dish is the local settling of an imported form, and that is documented history rather than legend.

What to order

The words to know are few, because the empanada de pino is mostly itself, but the distinctions are real.

• de horno — baked. This is the pino empanada in its proper form: a big, bread-like pastry you can hold in one hand.
• frita — fried. Smaller, blistered, and usually filled with cheese rather than pino; a fried pino empanada exists but is the exception, and ordering pino generally gets you the baked one.
• pino on its own is the filling, and it is worth saying the word when you order, since a bakery may have three or four fillings on at once and pino is what marks out the classic.

The single most useful thing to know is about the olive. A traditional empanada de pino carries a black olive with the pit still in it. This is not a mistake or a cost-cut; it is how it has always been made, and biting down expecting a pitted olive is the fastest way a visitor cracks a tooth or at least their composure. Eat the olive end carefully. Consider it a small test the empanada sets you.

The raisins divide opinion, and it is worth knowing that they are meant to be there. Plenty of Chileans dislike them and pick them out; a version without any is not wrong, just one side of a domestic argument. The egg, by contrast, is not negotiable — a pino empanada with no slice of egg in it has skipped a step.

What to avoid

The failure of a bad empanada de pino is almost always the same: it becomes an empanada of onion pretending to be one of beef.

The honest ratio is roughly half beef, half onion. The industrial and frozen versions tilt it heavily toward onion, which is cheap, and pad it further with dough, so you bite through a thick pale shell into a wet, greyish, mostly-onion paste with a few threads of meat and — the real giveaway — no egg and no olive. Those two inclusions cost money and effort, so their absence is the clearest single sign the empanada was made down to a price rather than up to a standard.

A second tell is the pastry. A good one is baked to order or at least the same day, the dough golden and faintly crisp at the folds; a bad one has been sitting reheated under a lamp until the shell is pale, tough and greasy. In a bakery, the ones just out of the oven are worth waiting the few minutes for.

Be wary, too, of the very cheap empanada sold from a stand aimed at passing tourists in the centre — small, thin-filled, priced as if fresh, and often the frozen sort warmed through. The neighbourhood bakeries that supply locals are both cheaper and better, which is the opposite of what the central location implies.

Practicalities

If there is one week to eat these, it is the week of the September national holidays — the Fiestas Patrias around the eighteenth, the Dieciocho — when the empanada becomes very nearly the national flag on a plate. Bakeries bake them by the thousand, the temporary fondas set up ovens, and families order them by the dozen. They are made and eaten all year round, but that week is when the whole country is paying attention to getting them right, and it is the easiest time to eat a good one.

The natural place to buy them the rest of the year is an amasandería, a neighbourhood bakery that makes its own dough, where a baked empanada de pino runs roughly 1,500 to 3,500 Chilean pesos — cheap, filling, and easily a light meal on its own given the size. Pay much less and you are almost certainly buying the frozen, onion-heavy version; pay a good deal more, in a sit-down restaurant, and the empanada is usually a starter rather than a better empanada.

They are sold hot from the oven and are meant to be eaten soon after, while the pino is still warm and the pastry has not gone leathery — a cooled one reheats poorly and a long-cooled one not at all. Buy them close to when you will eat them rather than carrying them around the afternoon.

Bakeries take cards without difficulty, so cash is not the concern it is for street food. The concern is the juice: a properly moist pino will run a little when you bite in, so hold it over the paper it came in rather than over yourself, and start from a corner rather than the middle.