Caldillo de Machaca Sonorense

This is from Sonora. The northwest. The state of vaqueros, of cattle ranches stretched across desert that does not forgive carelessness, of wheat fields where flour tortillas became the daily bread because corn would not grow. If you came here looking for a corn tortilla and a tomatillo salsa, you came to the wrong state. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Sonora's kitchen runs on beef, wheat, and the chiltepin that grows wild in the sierra.

Machaca is the answer to a desert problem. Before refrigeration, the ranchers salted strips of beef, hung them on wires in the dry air, and pounded them on stone with a mallet until the fibers shredded. The word comes from machacar, to pound. What you buy now at a Sonoran carniceria is the same product, made the same way, by families who have been doing it for four or five generations. Do not substitute jerky. Jerky is sweet and leathery. Machaca is dry, salty, and shreds clean.

The caldillo is what a ranch wife made for her family on a weekday. Toast the machaca in lard. Build a sofrito with onion, garlic, tomato. Add a roasted Anaheim chile, the gentle green chile of the noroeste, not a poblano and not a hatch. Add potato to stretch the dish, broth to bring it together, and a chiltepin if you want the heat that the Sonorans put on their table the way other Mexicans put salsa. Serve it with sobaqueras, the wide thin flour tortillas folded under a baker's armpit, sobaco, while they rest. They are not a mistake. They are Sonora. No me vengas con atajos.