Argentine empanadas: the regional guide and how to make them

Key Takeaways

• Argentine empanadas are regional, not national. The filling, the pastry, the size and the cooking method all change by province.
• Hand cut beef rather than minced is the single detail that separates a good empanada from a supermarket one.
• The repulgue, the crimped edge, is a naming system. Each fold pattern signals a filling so a plate of mixed empanadas can be read at a glance.
• Fried belongs to the north and to a certain kind of bar. Baked is the Buenos Aires default.
• You can learn to make two classic styles from scratch in a Palermo Hollywood atelier for US$98 in three and a half hours.

The regional map

Region	What defines it	Cooking method
Salta	Small, hand cut beef, potato, cumin, spring onion, sometimes a little spice	Usually baked in a clay oven
Tucuman	Juicy beef, matambre cut, generous fat, eaten leaning forward	Fried or baked
Mendoza	Beef with olives, hard boiled egg, a sturdier pastry	Baked
Cordoba	Slightly sweet, raisins or potato, sugar dusted on the crust	Baked
Catamarca and La Rioja	Smaller, sweeter, often with a sugared finish	Baked
Buenos Aires	Carne suave and carne picante, plus ham and cheese, humita, caprese	Baked, usually

The argument between provinces about which empanada is correct is real, unresolvable and one of the more entertaining conversations you can start at an Argentine table. Salta and Tucuman are the two that take it most seriously, and both are right about entirely different things.

Argentina’s national tourism office groups the country’s empanada styles into eight regional traditions, from Patagonia’s lamb filling to Formosa’s charqui version. The same source credits the Tucuman style with thirteen distinct repulgue folds, enough that a mixed plate can be read like a menu without asking. Tucuman takes the rivalry further than table talk: Famaillá runs a national empanada festival for 3 days every September, the closest the country gets to naming a capital of the dish.

What makes Argentine empanadas good

Hand cut beef, not minced. Cuchillo, cut with a knife, is written on the menu when a place does it, because it costs more and takes longer. The texture is the whole difference. Minced beef goes uniform and slightly grey. Hand cut stays in pieces you can identify.

Fat that has somewhere to go. A dry empanada is a failed empanada. The filling is cooked, cooled and often rested overnight so the fat sets, which is what lets it melt inside the pastry rather than leaking out of it in the oven.

Pastry made for the method. Baked empanadas use a discos de hojaldre style pastry that puffs and browns. Fried ones use a plainer, sturdier dough that blisters instead. Using one for the other is the shortcut that betrays a bad kitchen.

A repulgue that holds. The crimp is structural before it is decorative. A badly folded empanada opens in the oven and the filling burns onto the tray.

The repulgue: the code on the edge

The repulgue is the folded, rope like edge, made by pinching and turning the pastry with your thumb and forefinger, and it is how a kitchen labels what it just made.

There is no single national dictionary, and every family and every province has its own key. What is consistent is the principle: a plate arriving with four different edges is a plate of four different fillings, and everybody at the table can read it without asking. A simple pressed fork edge usually means ham and cheese. A full rope repulgue usually means beef. A pastry closed into a half moon with a fold at the centre often means humita, the sweetcorn and white sauce filling.

Learning to make one is genuinely difficult for about twenty minutes and then suddenly is not. It is the part of a cooking class where the room goes quiet.

Where to learn to make Argentine empanadas

The empanada cooking class in Buenos Aires runs in an atelier in Palermo Hollywood and costs US$98 per person for three and a half hours.

What	Detail
Price	US$98 per person
Duration	3.5 hours
Location	Atelier in Palermo Hollywood
Included	Two classic empanada styles from scratch, snacks and drinks during the class, the shared meal with Malbec
Optional add on	Wine tasting, US$35
Family format	Minimum two adults and one child
Non alcoholic option	Yes, on request
Cancellation	Free up to 48 hours ahead

It is hands on rather than a demonstration. You make the filling, you roll and fill the discs, and you learn the repulgue on your own dough, which means the first six are ugly and the rest are not. Then everybody sits down and eats what the room made, with Malbec, or with the non alcoholic alternative if you prefer.

Dietary restrictions are asked for in advance, and bookings close two days before the class. Special rates apply on 24 and 25 December and on 31 December and 1 January.

How to eat them without embarrassing yourself

Hold it with your fingers, not with cutlery. Bite the end, not the middle, and lean forward on the first bite of a Tucuman style one, because the juice is the point and it is coming out.

Do not add sauce. Chimichurri lives on the asado table, not on empanadas, and asking for ketchup will be remembered.

Two to three empanadas is a snack, six is a meal, and a docena, twelve, is what gets ordered when a family is not cooking. They are also the standard thing to eat at midnight before going out, and the standard thing to eat cold from the fridge the next morning.

If you want the full context of Argentine home cooking, the family asado experience at US$104 covers the other half of the tradition, and our list of things to do in Buenos Aires under US$100 puts the class next to everything else at that price.

Where to start

If you have one food experience in Buenos Aires and want to leave with a skill rather than a photograph, book the empanada cooking class at US$98 and go hungry.

If you just want to eat well without the class, order a mixed dozen, read the edges, and pay attention to which province the kitchen is from. That question, asked at the counter, gets a better answer than any review site. The old-school bars and bodegones of San Telmo are a reliable place to start asking it.