Making Chilean Empanadas at Home 🇨🇱
With September 18th coming up, I wanted to make Chilean empanadas de pino at home. Growing up, my parents never actually made them—we would drive almost an hour to a Chilean bakery just to pick them up. I’m Chilean, but I’m definitely not going to pretend I have some secret family recipe that’s been passed down for generations. I use Pilar Hernandez’s recipe from Chilean Food & Garden, and it’s the one I keep coming back to.
Pilar Hernandez's Chilean Beef Empanadas de Pino recipe
One thing I’ve learned since having kids is that anything I can prep ahead makes cooking something like this so much more realistic. So instead of trying to make the filling, dough, assemble everything and bake all in one day, I split it into two.
Day 1: Target Drive Up + Make the Pino
First step: ingredients.
And because this is real life with two kids, I did what I do probably four or five times a week — Target Drive Up. I ordered everything I was missing, picked it up without getting everyone out of the car, and headed home to make the pino.
The pino is the traditional beef-and-onion filling inside Chilean empanadas. Pilar’s recipe actually recommends making it the day before, which worked perfectly for me because the filling needs time to cool and refrigerate anyway.
I thought this part was going to feel like a project, but the pino was surprisingly easy to make. Once it was finished, I put it in the refrigerator overnight and called Day 1 done.
The next day, it was time to make the dough — which was definitely the part I was most nervous about. I had never made empanada dough from scratch before, and my first few were a little thicker than they probably should have been. By the second batch, I was already getting the hang of rolling them thinner.
Were they perfect? Definitely not. The dough came out a little harder than I wanted, so next time I’ll roll it thinner and keep a closer eye on the baking time. But the flavor was there. The pino, egg, raisins, and olives together tasted exactly like the empanadas I remember growing up — and honestly, that made the whole experiment worth it.
This definitely won’t be the last time I make them. Next September 18th, I’m coming back for round two. 🇨🇱
