Dough Problem!
I've made this empanada dough (for sweet empanadas) twice now and had the same issue: each time, the dough spreads so much, they look like cookies. Does anyone know what might be wrong?
Here is the recipe:
1.5 cups AP flour
.5 cup cake flour
.5 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 cup butter, chilled & cut into cubes
.5 cup heavy cream, chilled
I mixed the flours, sugar, and baking powder first, then added the butter and cut it in by hand. Some pieces were larger and some smaller. I kept the butter refrigerated after cubing it. I added the cream a tablespoon at a time and mixed with a fork. When the mixture looked moist enough, I dumped it onto a board, formed it into a rough mass, and spread it a few times to get the butter in, then shaped it into a disc and put it into the fridge. It was in there for hours before I rolled it out. it was a bit sticky while rolling. I even put the empanadas into the fridge for about 10 minutes after shaping and before baking to chill again, but they still spread.
What am I doing wrong? I've made empanada dough before without cake flour and cream and that one didn't have these issues.
...but at first glance the ratios seem a bit off - more like pastry than bread. For only 2 cups total flour, 10 tablespoons of sugar and a full cup of butter seem like kind of a lot. You see ratios (percentages) like that in cookie recipes, which is how you described your empanadas.
Sadly, I am not able to offer a fix for the problem - I wish I were. I haven't played with sweet dough recipes enough to know which ingredient to tweak for the best result. Plus, the altitude I live at confounds things even further. In general though, when I want my cookies to spread less, I have to back off on the sugar or fat (or both) and add a little more flour. That might work for your empanadas too. That's just a guess though.
I'll follow this thread with curiosity to see what other, more knowledgeable, bakers suggest.
--Mike
Thanks Mike. I did wonder about the ratios, but I also didn't want to place blame on the recipe right away and possibly ignore my own ineptitude. :)
I'll see what others say or perhaps just forgo that recipe and use a more standard one.
in the recipe. Cream also is high in butter fat.
Could the cream be sour cream? Most recipes contain an "acid" component like a spoon of vinegar.
Mini Oven, no, it said heavy cream. I guess I should look up a new recipe.
will act like a liquid when baking... melt. That might be your cookie effect.
It is okay to disagree with a recipe. Many times they are not edited correctly. Lots of numbers etc and many editors are not cooks so wouldn't notice if an ingredient was not accurate.
That said, I agree with others, too much butter. A cup of butter is 16 TB which comes to 392g total. Your flour is only 260g which makes the butter a whopping 150% of the flour.
A half a cup of butter makes more sense and would drop it down to about 40% of the flour which is still a lot of butter but manageable - similar to a brioche.
Another thing to check - is your baking powder fresh? It does have a limited shelf life unless you are making your own using Bakewell Cream and Baking Soda which doesn't go bad.
Baking powder doesn't need an acidic ingredient to work so it is fine in your recipe. You might like to check THIS out.
Good Luck
:*)
P.S. i got curious about a sweet empanada recipe so I did a Google search and came up with THIS. Looks like your recipe is right with the butter amount so I was wrong in saying too much butter. This recipe differs from yours in several ways so you will have to decide what to do next….Hope you are getting a good deal when buying butter or you are going to be out a lot of $$$$ :O
The recipe still has more flour weight than butter weight. I figure flour is about 150g more than the butter.
I agree. That is why I said I was wrong about the butter.
Apparently this kind of dough does use a lot of butter but the second recipe I linked to has eggs as a binder which may hold things together rather than the cream in the original recipe.
Sugar is also less in the link I provided which makes a difference in the end result too.
Hard to tell without making it oneself and these aren't on my 'to bake' list :)
This correction is straight forward. So first the answer:
1.5 cups AP flour
.5 cup cake flour
.5 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon1 tsp baking powder1/2 tsp baking soda (to counteract the acid of the heavy cream)
1 cup6 Tbsp butter, chilled & cut into cubes.50.25 cup heavy cream, chilled0.25 Cup Milk
Notes: Someone mentioned that this is a cookie recipe. Not quite. It is actually a pure rugelach recipe. Using my baking calculator I got 0.425 (rugelach moistness) and 27% (rugelach butter content). An empanada is more of 0.38 and 9%. The correction I made above is approximately the standard empanada recipe. Enjoy!
Having a reference like that would be awesome. I'd like to have a listing of the "standard" percentages for various kinds of doughs.
It would be so much easier to memorize something like that, then you could make your tweaks to individual recipes to suit your preferences. :-)
--Mike