Camote Asado Sinaloense

This is Sinaloa. The northwest. Cattle country, shrimp country, mesquite country. The state that grills more meat per Sunday than anywhere else in Mexico, and that grills it over mesquite because mesquite is what grows out of the dry ground.

Camote asado is the dish that finishes a parrillada. The carne asada comes off the grill, the cebollitas are charred and squeezed with lime, and somebody, usually a tio with a long pair of tongs, pushes the camotes into the coals to cook slowly while everyone eats. By the time the meat is gone and the beer is half-warm, the camotes are ready. They come out black on the outside, the skin papery and hard, with amber syrup bleeding out of any split. You crack them open and the inside is the color of saffron, soft, almost custardy, sweet the way a roasted onion is sweet, concentrated by an hour in the embers.

The chile here is chiltepin. Not jalapeno. Not serrano. Chiltepin, the wild bird's-eye chile that grows in the sierras of Sonora and Sinaloa, harvested by hand in the fall and dried until it turns deep red. It is small, round, and hot, and Sinaloans crush it into salt to dust over almost anything that needs a finish: a slice of mango, a cold beer's rim, a split camote pulled from the coals. The salt is the condiment, not a garnish. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

My mother did not make this. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco roasts its sweet potatoes differently, more often in the oven. But I learned this in a backyard in Culiacan, watching a senora named Dona Mariela pull six camotes out of a fire with kitchen tongs while she told me how her father used to do it on the ranch. She handed me one wrapped in newspaper, gave me a pinch of chiltepin salt in a piece of folded paper, and said: pruebalo asi. I have made it that way ever since.