Empanadas en Argentina

I have never been one to travel just for the sake of traveling. Maybe that’s a flaw of mine, but I think it just makes me feel more organized if my travel has some kind of unifying purpose or theme to govern it. That’s not to say that I am incapable of going somewhere new and just resting and living and taking in what there is to take in. But after thinking about it this quarter, I wouldn’t call that travel… I would call that vacation. To me, traveling is a chance to take risks, to go somewhere new and to learn something about myself and about the rest of humanity in the process.

So, with that in mind, I think there are two main types of traveling that I would like to do during my lifetime. First, I am confident that I will, at some point, spend a significant amount of time working in a different country (probably in Africa, but I'm not sure). Currently, the vision that I have for this part of my life is to work in a developing country either teaching or practicing some form of medicine (or both) with the goal of intentionally training and encouraging local replacements for myself. Now that I write that down, it sounds a little vague and I certainly have not worked out the details yet, but it is something that I have wanted to do for a very long time and I have every intention of following through when the time is right.

The journey that I have thought about for this project is of an entirely different variety and much more likely for the near future. It falls under the second category of travel that I would like to take part in. I like to call it the “eat, sleep and run” category. Don’t worry; it’s not what you might think. This is not a “consume all you can in one place and then leave without ever really engaging with the desitination” category. No. That is the opposite of what I want to do.

Instead, the “eat, sleep and run” category of travel is one in which I would go to a new place, eat the food the locals eat, sleep in the places the locals sleep and travel the way the locals travel (hence the running). The idea is to learn about a place and its inhabitants by interacting with the culture and the people in ways that most closely approximate the “regular life” of the place. Of course, I realize that this is idealized travel in many ways and would vary from place to place, but I imagine that a lot of the fun would be in figuring out how to make it work in each new culture. Trips of this kind would last longer than a “vacation” and be much shorter than any career-determined travel: probably averaging at around 2 months in duration. Ideally, I would learn to speak some of the local language before I leave and would get better at it as I go.

All of that is preface for the journey I have chosen to explore for this project: an “eat, sleep and run” trip to Argentina with the intention of eating many, many empanadas. In case you’re not sure what an empanada is, just think of a warm buttery pastry filled with anything you want: meat, cheese, veggies, potato, fruit, etc. Why empanadas and why Argentina? I was inspired by two close friends of mine. One has Polish-Argentine parents and has traveled frequently to Argentina to visit extended family. Based on her family heritage, you can imagine the glorious plethora of food options around their dinner table. One day, at a birthday party for this friend, I ate some of her mother’s empanadas and homemade chimichurri sauce. I fell in love. Since then, I have tried searching for good Argentine restaurants in Seattle (there are very few) and making my own empanadas to no avail. They just aren’t the same.

So there is motivation #1 for my trip: to find good empanadas. But empanadas exist in many countries in South America and I felt that I needed to limit my trip to a single country so that I might actually learn something about the people I would visit with. I chose Argentina because of my first friend’s heritage and because another good friend of mine recently returned from a study abroad in Buenos Aires raving about her time there. If everything were to go as I have planned, the three of us would travel to Argentina together, speak Spanish the entire time (all three of us speak pretty well) and enjoy one another’s company. In other words, motivation #2 for this particular trip is to learn from and alongside my friends. My plan would be to travel around to different parts of Argentina making use of their extensive bus system and hostel network and eating the varieties of empanadas that are “native” to each part of the country. We would start in Buenos Aires in mid-July (the timing is important as you will see) where the empanadas are in plenty. From what I hear from my friends, you can find basically any kind of empanada that you desire in B.A. The homes of my friends’ family/host family would act as “home base” for our trip. From there, we would travel south through the province of Las pampas where the empanadas reflect the crossing of various regional influences from Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza and Patagonia (the southern provinces). The most frequent empanada fillings in las pampas are red peppers, carrots, hard boiled egg, and currants. I imagine that the combination of B.A. empanadas and las pampas empanadas would give us a good idea of the varieties that we should look for during the next leg of the journey.

After crossing through Las pampas, we would journey further south where seafood is the common empanada stuffing and then back along Argentina’s western border with Chile. In Cordoba (in the middle of the country) we would expect to find sweeter empanadas made with raisins, potatoes and sugar. Moving even further north in Salta, Jujuy, Catamarca and La Rioja we would encounter more meat (goat meat especially), onion, olives and peas. The hope is that this travel would take us through about a month and a half (here is where timing is critical) and that we would arrive in the small province of Tucumán in early September. Around this time, the National Empanada Festival should be beginning.

From what I’ve read, this festival is a pretty big deal. People come from all over to enter their empanadas in contests, eat other people’s empanada creations and generally celebrate Argentine culture with folklore bands and dancing. There is even an “Empanada Queen” crowned (I haven’t been able to figure out if this is a beauty pageant or simply the nomination of the best empanada chef)! After the festival ended, we would head out east to Iguazu falls and stop to enjoy the beefy empanadas available in the provinces of Corrientes, Formosa and Misiones along the way. From there we would return to B.A., spend some more time with friends and family and then return home with (hopefully) very full and contented bellies.

The entire trip would probably take between 2 and 3 months depending on how long we decide to stay in each place. Ideally, we could spend more time meeting people and enjoying empanadas than traveling in buses, but I’m not sure how all of that would work. A large part of me wants simply to go and figure it all out when we get there.