Tacos de Carne Asada Sonorenses

This is a Sonora taco. Not a Mexico City taco, not a Tijuana taco, not whatever passes for carne asada north of the border. Sonora. Cattle country. The state where the cows outnumber the people and the carne asada is taken as seriously as anything you will find in any cuisine on earth.

The meat is diezmillo, a cut from the chuck flap that Sonora ranchers learned to grill over mesquite generations ago. The marinade is light: sour orange, a little soy, garlic, salt. It is not a curing bath. The flavor comes from the mesquite fire, not from soaking the beef into submission. Mesquite is the wood of the Sonoran desert, dense and resinous and burning hotter than almost any other hardwood, and it is the reason a Sonora carne asada tastes like nothing else.

The tortilla is flour, and small, and handmade. The flour tortilla is a Noroeste birthright, not a Tex-Mex invention. Sonora has been milling wheat since the Jesuits brought it in the 17th century and the women of Hermosillo and Magdalena have been pressing tortillas de harina paper-thin on hot comales since long before anyone in Texas had the idea of putting yellow cheese on a burrito. Use the small ones for tacos. The big ones, the sobaqueras and tortillas de agua, are for burros, not tacos.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not make Sonora carne asada. I learned this dish on the road, at a ranch outside Cananea where the family ran the mesquite fire from sundown until the meat ran out, where the men chopped the diezmillo on a wooden board the size of a door and the women pressed flour tortillas one by one. There was no recipe written down. There was a fire, a cut of beef, and a generation of women who knew exactly when to pull the meat off. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.