Can a Local Couple’s Empanadas Weather This Pandemic?

You can get ’em piping hot from that one food truck on the UT campus. You can also get them in packages, from your grocer’s freezer. And now you can get the frozen ones delivered directly to your shelter-in-place home, too.

We’re talking about empanadas, yes, but specifically mmmpanadas – those tasty packages of savory veggies and meat and cheese and more, purveyed by the husband-and-wife team of Cody and Kristen Fields, the local couple who started out with a single food truck in 2008, achieved much success at local festivals, and realized part of their longtime grocery store aspirations by winning H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best in 2018.

[Note: There’s green chile chicken mmmpanadas. There’s spinach mushroom. Ham and cheese. Spicy black bean. Cheeseburger, FFS. And more – and some sweet options, too – and all of them contained within a pastry shell that, the trickiest part, the Fieldses figured out how to make behave properly even when heated in a microwave.]

These mega-morsels are available in more than 300 stores throughout Austin and Texas, which is good news for empanada-lovers and mmmpanada-sellers alike, but, as you’re probably aware, the coronavirus isn’t doing anybody any favors. Thus the recent pivot.

“For home delivery, we teamed up with our friend Manuel Flores over at Mom & Pops All Natural Frozen Pops,” says Kristen. “He's the person who actually delivers the mmmpanadas.”

“We’ve worked with Mom & Pops for a long time, selling their products off our truck and trailer,” adds Cody. “And now Manuel is struggling like everyone else, so it’s an opportunity to work with one of our friends and get our stuff out there however we can – and that’s one of the changes due to Covid. We’ve always done catering drop-offs of hot empanadas for people’s birthday parties or whatever, but the frozen local deliveries we’re doing now, it’s just to try to get some more revenue coming in besides from the grocery stores.”

We know, from a strictly eating-the-delicious-things perspective, why we’re involved with empanadas. But why did they choose to specialize in them?

“After I got my engineering degree at UT,” says Cody, “I did a lot of traveling through Central and South America for my first job, and just really fell in love with empanadas. And when I got back to the States and met Kristen, empanadas were something I was missing. I just couldn’t really find a decent one.”

Kristen nods. “We were like, ‘Why doesn’t anyone make empanadas for the frozen aisle in the grocery store?’”

So, as so often happens in Austin, they took matters into their own hands. And by matters, we mean dough.

“I was very picky about the crust that we developed,” says Cody. “I’d really enjoyed the empanadas in Costa Rica, the Caribbean-style patties, and wanted to model the crust after that. So we started there and just messed with different recipes until we found one we really liked and was scalable for production. And all the filling recipes we developed ourselves. The very first empanada we made was soy chorizo and brie – which is not something we’d seen before. But the first time I made empanadas for Kristen, we were staying in New York, and I went to the bodega downstairs to purchase stuff to make them. And I wanted chorizo, but it was kind of a fancy bodega, and all they had was soy chorizo and brie – and that’s how that was inspired. But once Kristen and I started making them together, we just sat down over a couple of beers and hashed out flavors that we wanted.”

“We got a lot of input from our friends and family, too,” says Kristen. “The asparagus with cheese and prosciutto, that’s a take on a kind of appetizer my mom would always make. And the green chile chicken is our version of a ranch-style casserole – and, even there, I got some advice from one of my Pilates clients, who turned me on to Hatch green chili, which rocks my world.”

Fortunately, those mmmpanadas can be found at Wheatsville – “They were really the first retailer to give our product a chance,” says Cody – and at H-E-B and Whole Foods as well, and so are just down the street somewhere. Or, as we said, delivered right to you. Unfortunately, the whole friends-and-family part, or at least the being-out-among-the-crowds aspect, has been put pandemically on hold. And the gregarious Fields duo, no matter how many units they might move through the supply chain, can’t wait for the seclusion to end.

“I’m a UT alum,” says Cody, “and I love that I have my truck, a business there on the campus – and we had our trailer down at Barton Springs for three seasons, you know? That’s the type of stuff we miss. We love this city, so it’s been difficult.”

“I really miss the connection to customers who are right there, eating the product,” says Kristen. “Because, yes, that’s the best market research you can get – but it’s also baked into our brand to be out in the world and having fun. And whenever we have an opportunity to do that, we will.”