Café Talega Sonorense

This is Sonora's coffee. Not Mexico City's, not Veracruz's, not Chiapas's. Sonora does not grow coffee, the climate is wrong for it, the beans come up from the south, but the way Sonora prepares it belongs to the desert and to the ranches that built the state.

Café talega is built on three things and you cannot skip any of them. The beans are toasted on a comal with piloncillo until the sugar caramelizes directly onto the bean. The water is boiled in a clay olla with a stick of canela de Ceylan, real Mexican cinnamon, not the cassia bark sold as cinnamon in supermarkets. The brewed coffee is filtered through a cotton talega, a drawstring cloth bag that holds the grounds back and lets the dark, clean liquid through. No paper. No metal mesh. Cloth. The talega is what gives the coffee its name and its texture, a body that paper filter cannot produce.

This is ranchero coffee. It is poured at four in the morning when the men are heading out to the cattle, and it is poured again at six in the evening when they come back. It takes evaporated milk and another grating of piloncillo at the cup if you want it that way, the norteño way, the way they drink it on the ranches of the sierra outside Cananea and Bavispe. No me vengas con atajos. Skip the comal toasting and you have brewed coffee with sugar in it. That is not café talega. That is a different drink with the wrong name.