1. Measure flour into enormous bowl. This scale she is using is the coolest thing ever. There´s a counterweight of 2 lbs, and then a series of strings you can hold it up by. Depending on which string you hold, you can measure diffferent weights. It works by moving the pivot point. It´s ingenious. So using this ingenious manual scale, we started with 7 lbs of white flour.
2. Add yeast. It´s 1 Tb of yeast per pound of flour.
3. Add water, little by little, stirring with hands, until all flour is incorporated. At this point, it should have the texture very thick pancake batter. Then you add salt to taste (when it´s mixed you should just barely be able to taste the salt), sugar (2 for 7 lbs flour), and manteca (this means rendered pig fat). For this quantity of bread they use basically a Coke bottle of pig fat. When I start making my own bread, I will probably switch to butter or margarine or something since I can´t see myself pouring all that pig fat into my bread, but it sure does taste good. Unfortunately, I don´t have a picture of the pig fat.
4. Then you begin adding more flour until you have the correct texture for dough. It should be to the point where it just barely sticks to your hands.
5. Then you dump it on the table for kneading.
6. They usually split up their gigantic quantity of bread into 2 big bunches, but they split off a little piece for me to work on. That´s my piece at the bottom of this picture. To knead the bread, you get it into kind of a roll, and with one hand hold the edge closest to you. With the other hand, push the rest of the bread away from you, stretching it into a sheet with two ridges on it. You can see that really well in his chunk of dough. Then roll the ridges back together, and working your way down your dough roll, tear it. Two hands next to each other, quick shearing force. Keep tearing it all the way down. Then start over. Everything now and then, using the first technique, keep stretching until you have kind of a thin sheet, fold that up in the opposite direction than you were kneading. Now the ends are the center and the center has become the ends.
7. Once the dough is ready, they roll it out into long tubes and cut it into chunks for the small breads.
8. They lay out the empanada chunks in rows to rise. They cover them, and by the time you´re done forming the other bread, the empanadas are ready to continue.
9. This time we also made something called kachitos (sp?), which are shaped like little horseshoes. These are often toasted and iced. To make kachitos or pan simple, you roll out the dough, and cut it into smaller pieces.
10. Roll these into ropes and lay them out on baking pans.
11. Leave them to rise, while you go back to working on your empanadas.
12. Grab a slab of now risen empanada dough and roll it out with a wine bottle. Be sure to use plenty of flour to keep the dough from sticking to the bottle or to the table.
13. Usually, empanadas have a mixture of crumbly cheese, sugar, and flour, but there wasn´t any cheese yesterday, so we made some with just sugar, and some with pineapple jelly. More specifically a mixture of pineapple jelly, strawberry syrup, and flour.
14. Spread the jelly or sugar evenly on one half of the empanada.
15. Fold over and flatten edges with wine bottle.
16. Roll the edges like pie crust to seal.
17. This is one of my better empanadas. Look at those edges! That´s harder than it looks.
18. These are the trays of risen pan simple, all ready for the oven.
19. Heat up the oven.
20. Put bread in oven.
21. Take out delicious, slightly browned loaves of bread, as well as piping hot, sticky sweet empanadas.
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