Pollo Asado Sonorense al Carbon

This is from Sonora. Northwest Mexico, desert country, cattle country, mesquite country. The cuisine of the north is not the cuisine of the south, and people who know only Mexico City or Oaxaca are sometimes surprised that flour tortillas are Mexican at all. They are. They are sonorense. The wheat fields of the Yaqui valley have been feeding northern kitchens since the Jesuits planted them in the 1600s, and the tortilla de harina, paper-thin and the size of a record album, is one of the great achievements of Mexican home cooking.

The pollo asado is the Saturday-afternoon bird. Every carniceria from Hermosillo to Ciudad Obregon has a wood-fired grill out back, and on weekend afternoons the line forms early. The chicken is spatchcocked flat, marinated in achiote and sour orange and lime, and grilled over mesquite coals until the skin is mahogany and the meat smells of desert wood. You buy it whole, wrapped in butcher paper, and you carry it home with a stack of flour tortillas, a tub of frijoles puercos, and a jar of salsa de chiltepin from the wild chile bushes that grow along the foothills.

The mesquite is not optional. Gas grill pollo asado is a different dish, fine but not Sonoran. If you cannot get mesquite charcoal, find hardwood mesquite chunks at any hardware store and add them to whatever fire you have. The smoke is half the recipe. The achiote does the visual work, that deep brick-red color that announces a northern grill from across the parking lot, but the smoke is what makes a Sonoran tell you yes, that is right.

My mother was from Jalisco, not Sonora. She did not cook this. I learned it in 2009 from a woman named Rosario who ran a carniceria in Ures, a small town in the Sonora river valley. She let me sit by her grill for three afternoons and asked me only that I not write down her exact ratio of achiote to citrus. I did not. What follows is mine, built from her teaching and from a dozen other northern grills. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Sonora's belongs to mesquite.