Empanadas
Together with their three daughters, Ernesto Prada and Mireya Baez opened the small bakery and cafe in 2014 after running a successful empanada business in Bogota. And while their menu reflects a mix of traditional and modern flavors — 16 empanadas total, including beef-potato, vegetarian mushroom-quinoa and sweet pineapple — the core recipes come from Prada-baez’s grandmother, Isabel, who was a skilled cook and baker back home.
“We grew up eating her empanadas,” Prado-baez says. “Our beef and chicken empanadas, our pastry dough and our guava filling are all my grandma.”
While Prado-baez won’t reveal the dough recipe — you’ll have to imagine the hours of folding to get those buttery layers — she is sharing the bakery’s hogao, the cumin-tinged Colombian sofrito used to season empanada meat fillings — and much more.
“It’s good on eggs, potatoes and in soups, everything,” she says.
When they opened Milohas nearly eight years ago, Prado-baez says that almost no one in the area was familiar with Colombian empanadas. But customers could relate to them.
“Every culture has a turnover with filling,” she says, from samosas to tortas, pasties, piroshkis and burekas. “But they were open enough to try it, and that’s what’s great about the Bay Area.”
Walnut Creek’s Guisell Harith Osorio found the same to be true. When it opened in 2014, her South American restaurant, Sabores del Sur, quickly became a gathering place for her fellow Chileans and nonchileans alike to fill up on prietas, bottomless sangria and Osorio’s seven types of empanadas, including cheese, veggie and halal beef. Osorio’s dough is her pride. Made with equal parts butter and lard, it yields a classically bready vessel for her Chilean and Peruvian-spiced fillings.
“I’ve always wanted people to understand my culture and my country through my food,” she says. “And I think it’s the dough that really sets the Chilean empanadas apart.”
As a result of the pandemic, Osorio was forced to shutter the Walnut Creek restaurant in December. But she has since pivoted to a takeout only commercial kitchen in Lafayette, offering a slimmed-down menu of bestsellers, including empanadas de pollo with the signature raisin, olive and hard-boiled egg filling. Orders for her most distinctive empanada, made with Chilean steak and spices, come from as far away as Turlock and Sacramento.
“I still miss the restaurant. It was like a home,” says Osorio, who started selling empanadas from her apartment in the 1990s before joining kitchen incubator La Cocina. “But I started this way, with people calling me to place orders.”
For Oumar Diouf, chef-owner of The Damel, which opened in Oakland in 2019 and added a Lake Merritt food truck in 2020, empanadas are a reflection of his Afro-brazilian roots. Born in Senegal, Diouf
began cooking alongside his mother when he was 13. He played professional soccer in Argentina and worked as a chef there and in Brazil for years before coming here four years ago.
As a result, his 14 empanadas offer a wide variety of flavors. The Cordero is made with halal lamb, ginger and jalapeño, while the meat-free Champignon is stuffed with mushrooms, cheese and cilantro. There are also four sweet empanadas, including the Humita, made with sweet corn and mascarpone. All have a crispy, crunchy exterior and are made with dough imported from Argentina.
“I try to create a balance of modern and traditional flavors, to twist it a little for a worldwide palate,” he says.
But one empanada is a direct reminder of home, and you likely won’t find it anywhere else in the Bay Area. The Fataya is deep-fried and stuffed with chili-flecked shrimp, tuna, garlic, onion and tomato. It’s a popular street food in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, where Diouf is planning to open another location of The Damel this year.
In the United States, he hopes to have 10 locations by 2022 — including several that only serve empanadas.
“I think the manageable size is part of it,” Diouf says of the empanada’s eternal appeal. “Three empanadas are still less than a burrito.”