Empanadas Salteñas

Salta is a colonial city in Argentina's northwest, at the foot of the Andes, and its empanadas are recognised across the country as the benchmark. They are larger than Buenos Aires empanadas, extraordinarily juicy, and filled with knife-cut beef (never ground), potato, onion and boiled egg, seasoned with cumin and paprika. The old bakeries bake them in clay ovens (horno de barro) at higher temperatures than electric ovens, so the pastry crisps faster. Eaten with a glass of Salta red wine, they are the everyday breakfast of the northwest.

Large, golden, shatteringly crisp empanadas with a juicy, spoon-tender knife-cut beef filling, potato and egg, cumin and paprika warm beneath. Bite carefully, the juice floods out.

Salta empanadas are defined by size, juiciness and knife-cut meat. The dough is wheat flour, lard, water and salt, rested and rolled thin. The filling is hand-diced beef (never ground, the cube texture is essential), parboiled potato, onion, hard-boiled egg, scallion, cumin, paprika and plenty of beef cooking liquid, which creates the signature juicy interior. Each empanada is folded into a half-moon, the edge crimped with a spiral seal that identifies Salta style, glazed with egg, and baked very hot, ideally in a clay oven, so the pastry crisps before the juice leaks. The high juice content is deliberate; Saltenos judge an empanada by how wet it is inside.