Burro de Carne con Chile Colorado Sonorense

This is a Sonoran dish. Not a Tex-Mex burrito, not a California Mission burrito, not whatever the gringos have been calling a burrito for the last fifty years. The burro belongs to the Noroeste, to the cattle country of Sonora that stretches from Hermosillo north to the Arizona border, where wheat grows where corn cannot and where the flour tortilla is not a substitute for anything. It is a birthright.

The filling is beef chuck and chile colorado. Not 'red chile.' Chile colorado, the long, deep-red dried Anaheim that ranchers in Magdalena and Caborca have been hanging in ristras outside their kitchens for generations. You toast it on a comal, soak it, blend it with garlic and cumin and oregano, strain it, and fry it in lard with the seared beef. Then you let it braise for two hours until the meat falls apart and the chile clings to every shred. There are no tomatoes in this. There is no cheddar in this. There is no rice in this. The Sonoran burro is austere on purpose.

The tortilla is the other half of the dish. A real sobaquera is twelve to fourteen inches across, paper-thin, made with manteca, stretched by hand over the cook's forearm, which is why it is called sobaquera, from sobaco, armpit. The senoras outside the Hermosillo airport make these in front of you, slapping the dough between their palms and stretching it across the back of their wrists until it is translucent. If you cannot find a real one, look for a Sonoran tortilleria. Do not substitute a small supermarket flour tortilla and call it a burro. That is something else.

My mother was from Jalisco and never made burros. I learned this dish on the road, in a kitchen in Hermosillo, from a woman named Dona Chela who fed cowboys for forty years and who told me, while she stretched a sobaquera over her arm, that the burro is the food of people who work outside in the sun. It travels. It holds. It feeds you for the whole afternoon. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Sonora.