Nopales con Chile Colorado Sonorense

This is a Sonoran dish. Not Mexico City Sonoran, not border Sonoran, but rancho Sonoran, the kind of cooking that comes out of kitchens where the desert is at the back door and the nopal grows wild on the property. Nopales con chile colorado is a working dish, made when the paddles are tender in the spring and again in the late summer flush, cooked in a wide cazuela on a wood stove or a propane burner, served with flour tortillas the size of a dinner plate.

The chile that gives this dish its name is chile California, also called chile colorado in Sonora. Do not substitute. The California is sweeter and milder than the guajillo it resembles, with a deep brick-red color and almost no heat. A small amount of guajillo and ancho rounds it out, but the California carries the dish. If your chile vendor does not stock it, find one who does. The mercados in Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregon stack them in burlap sacks by the kilo.

The nopales themselves are the second protagonist. Pick them young, no bigger than your hand, with a bright green skin and a firm body. Old paddles turn fibrous and bitter. Clean them carefully, the spines hide, and boil them with onion and garlic to release the baba, that slick green liquid the cactus gives off. Rinse until the water runs clear. From there it is a simple stew, but simple in the Sonoran sense, which is to say built on three or four good ingredients treated correctly.

My mother was from Jalisco, not Sonora, and she cooked nopales in the Jalisciense way, with tomato and chile de arbol. The first time I had them done sonorense was in a small dining room in Magdalena de Kino, served by a senora who had been cooking the same dish on the same stove for forty years. She handed me a flour tortilla the size of a record album and told me to scoop. I have been making her version ever since. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.