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Gaby Makes Empanadas | From the Test Kitchen | Bon Appétit

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A Test Kitchen Manager goes back to her grandmother’s kitchen table to make empanadas the right way.

Bon Appétit’s “From the Test Kitchen” series usually parks its cameras on chefs demonstrating dishes they’ve mastered on the job. In “Gaby Makes Empanadas,” released August 5, 2019, the subject is personal rather than professional. Gaby Melian, the magazine’s Test Kitchen Manager, steps in front of the camera to make the empanadas she learned to fold as a child in Buenos Aires — not a recipe she picked up on set, but one passed down at home.

• Gaby Melian, Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen Manager, is a Buenos Aires native who learned to make and crimp empanadas from her grandmother Porota and her mother Adriana.
• The episode focuses on a classic ham and cheese filling, with Melian walking through filling, sealing, and crimping the dough discs.
• Melian demonstrates both baked and fried versions of the same empanadas, and the video accompanies Bon Appétit’s published recipe for ham, cheese, and onion empanadas.

From Family Table to Test Kitchen Camera

Melian’s résumé inside Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen is built on recipe development and staff coordination, not on-camera hosting — which is what makes this episode stand out. The video leans on her specific upbringing: she didn’t study empanadas as a technique, she absorbed them as a kid watching Porota and Adriana work the dough. That distinction shapes how she talks through the process on camera, treating each fold less like a culinary school lesson and more like a habit she’s repeated her whole life.

Argentine empanadas carry regional variation the way American barbecue does — Tucumán, Salta, and Mendoza all claim their own crimp patterns and fillings. Melian’s approach in the video reflects the home-style version she grew up with rather than a restaurant interpretation, which is precisely the pitch of the “From the Test Kitchen” format: real technique from someone who actually lived it.

Filling, Sealing, and the Crimp

The episode’s technical core is the assembly: portioning the ham and cheese filling onto discs of dough, sealing the edges without trapping air, and crimping — the repeated fold-and-press pattern along the border that both seals the pastry and signals, visually, what’s inside once a batch comes out of the oven or fryer. Melian demonstrates the crimp by hand rather than with a fork-pressed edge, the technique she says she learned from her grandmother.

Gaby Melian learned to make and crimp empanadas as a young girl from her grandmother Porota and her mother Adriana.

That detail matters because crimping technique is one of the clearest tells between empanada styles — some cooks favor a simple pinch, others a repeated braid-like fold. Melian’s version, shown step by step in the episode, is the one she’d use if she were making a batch for her own family rather than for a magazine spread.

Baked Versus Fried, Side by Side

Rather than picking one cooking method, Melian prepares the empanadas both ways in the same episode — baked and fried — and walks through what changes in each. Baking produces a firmer, drier shell that holds its shape for stacking or reheating; frying gives the classic blistered, golden crust that’s closer to what’s served at Argentine parrillas and bakeries. Presenting both side by side lets the video double as a practical comparison rather than a single fixed technique.

The ham and cheese filling itself is deliberately simple — a combination meant to showcase the pastry work rather than compete with it. Bon Appétit’s published recipe for ham, cheese, and onion empanadas, which the video accompanies, builds on the same base Melian demonstrates on camera, giving viewers a written reference to follow alongside the visual walkthrough.

The format itself — one Test Kitchen personality, one dish, one camera crew following a specific technique start to finish — is the same model that’s carried other digital food and lifestyle series, the kind of single-host, single-stunt structure that’s turned plenty of web episodes into recurring watches, whether the hook is a record-breaking t-shirt launch or a themed escape room challenge.

What separates this episode from a standard demo is that Melian isn’t performing a recipe she developed for the brand — she’s showing viewers the exact fold her grandmother Porota taught her in Buenos Aires, on camera, for the first time in this format. That’s the whole reason “Gaby Makes Empanadas” exists as an episode rather than just another entry in Bon Appétit’s recipe archive.