Palm heart empada

With the biggest sporting event coming home to where it spiritually belongs in exactly 8 days, Karla and I have decided to go back to our roots. For the next month we’ll be posting traditional Brazilian recipes, and we’ll get started this week to get you all hyped up before kick off.

I have forgotten a lot of things since I was a little girl but the World Cup is definitely not one of them. It is a memorable month of families coming together, missing school to watch the semi-finals and a lot of wonderful snack food.

Palm heart or palmito in Portuguese is a very traditional vegetable normally added to salads in Brazil, it is basically the inner core of a palm tree and we buy them in brine. I can’t tell you how happy I was to find it in the supermarkets here when I first moved to the UK, they are tangy and very soft and I love them on a good empada.
It is not a spelling mistake, it is most certainly not the same as an empanada. No, it may look similar but it does not taste the same. It is hard to get the perfect empada pastry right, it is supposed to be flaky but at the same time moist with butteriness. The recipe below was given to me by my aunt and it is traditionally cooked in small aluminium cases but as I could not find any available in my local supermarket I used my 12cm loose bottom tins which yielded 4 empadas.

Palm heart empada

Filling:
Onion, chopped
2 tins (400g) Palm Hearts

Handful of chopped parsley
160g mascarpone
Salt and pepper to season
50g butter

Pastry :
5 tbsp vegetable oil
60g vegetable fat such as Trex or Crisco
40ml water
3 yolks (save the whites)
2 ½ cups plain flour
pinch of salt

1. Start by making the pastry, mix the fat and oil in a bowl and slowly add the flour, mixing it by hand until the mixture resembles a crumble.

2. Add the water and 2 egg yolks and keep mixing it with your finger until the dough has come together. It is ok if a little sticky. Leave it to rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 180C.

3. To prepare the filling start by browning the onion in butter. Add the heart of palm and fry a little. Turn heat off and add the remaining ingredients.

4. Dust a work surface with flour and with a rolling pin flatten the dough to half a cm thick. Line the tins with the dough leaving a little bit hanging of the edges. Here I like to brush the egg whites on the bottom and inside of the dough before putting a filling, it acts as a sealant so you don’t get a soggy bottom. Add the filling and brush the edges with a little of the remaining yolk. Cover with more dough cut into rounds and pinch the edges so they don’t open while cooking. Finish by brushing the rest of the yolk on top of the empadas.

5. Bake for 30-40 minutes (depending on the size of your empadas) or until it is golden in colour. Let it cool on a cookie rack and release from mold while still warm.