Carne Asada Sonorense

This is a Sonoran dish. Not a Texan one, not a generic Mexican one, not whatever a backyard barbecue calls carne asada when it is really skirt steak in a soy-and-lime marinade. Sonora is cattle country, the largest beef-producing state in Mexico, and carne asada there is the centerpiece of every Saturday afternoon, every birthday, every soccer game on television.

The rules are simple and they are absolute. Thin meat, a quarter-inch thick. Diezmillo is the cut, chuck flap with the right balance of fat and chew, though top sirloin and arrachera will work if your butcher knows what you are asking for. Coarse sea salt, nothing else, before it hits the grill. No marinade. No soy sauce. No beer. The Sonorans figured out long ago that good cattle over a mesquite fire does not need to be disguised. La carne se respeta.

The fire is mesquite. Not gas, not briquettes, not pellets. The mesquite that grows across the Sonoran desert is what gives the meat its smoke, and the cooks of Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregon will tell you the wood is half the recipe. The other half is the chiltepin, the wild bird-pepper that grows in the Sierra Madre Occidental and is gathered by hand by the people of the sierras and the Yaqui and Mayo communities. A salsa de chiltepin is hot and floral and tastes like the desert it grew in.

My mother was from Jalisco, not Sonora, but the first time I ate carne asada in Hermosillo, I understood why the north defends its food the way it does. The sobaqueras came folded around the meat, the cebollitas were charred and squeezed with lime, and a senora named Dona Aurelia ground chiltepin in a molcajete on the patio while the men worked the coals. She told me: in Sonora we do not season the meat. We respect it. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.