Chef Lupita
Burrito de Chicharrón Sonorense
Sonora's working morning burrito: chicharrón de cáscara stewed in chile colorado with diced potato, rolled tight in a paper-thin tortilla sobaquera and eaten standing up at the carreta.
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Tacos de Machaca Sonorense
Created by
Sonora's pounded dried beef, sauteed with onion, tomato, and chile colorado, folded into paper-thin flour tortillas. The portable desert lunch the vaqueros carried in their saddlebags long before anyone called it a taco.
Sandwiches & Wraps
Mexican
Weeknight
Make Ahead
Budget Friendly
20 min
Active Time
25 min cook•45 min total
Yield6 servings (about 12 small tacos)
Machaca is from Sonora. Specifically from the cattle ranches of the Sonoran Desert, where the vaqueros needed beef that could survive a week in the saddle without refrigeration. They salted strips of round or flank, hung them on the line in the dry desert wind, and pounded the cured meat soft with a stone before cooking it. The word comes from machacar, to pound. The technique is older than the border that runs above it.
This is a noroeste dish and it eats nothing like a taco from the south. The tortilla is flour, not corn. That is not Tex-Mex. The flour tortilla is a Sonoran birthright, made with wheat that the Spanish brought to the Yaqui valley in the 1700s and that thrived where corn struggled. The fat is lard or beef tallow. The chile is colorado del norte, mild and grassy, not a hot chile from Oaxaca or Yucatan. The salsa on the table is chiltepin, the wild pea-sized chile that grows along the arroyos of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Every part of this dish belongs to the desert that built it.
My mother was from Jalisco and she did not cook machaca. I learned it from a senora named Dona Lupita, my namesake, who ran a market stall in Hermosillo and who pounded her own carne seca on a wooden board worn smooth by thirty years of use. She told me that the vaqueros used to wrap the cooked machaca in a flour tortilla, tuck it inside their shirts to keep it warm, and ride for hours before lunch. The taco de machaca was a working person's food before it was anyone's idea of a meal. It still is. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.
Machaca, also called carne seca or carne machacada in different parts of the Mexican northwest, descends from pre-Columbian indigenous techniques of sun-drying meat that the Spanish adapted to beef after introducing cattle to Nueva Vizcaya in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Sonoran flour tortilla, which carries the dish, traces to the Jesuit missions of the late 1600s, when wheat was planted in the river valleys of the Yaqui and Mayo peoples and gradually displaced corn as the staple grain of the region's poorest cooks. The wild chiltepin chile, used in the table salsa that almost always accompanies machaca, is one of the few chiles native to what is now the United States-Mexico borderlands and was harvested by the Opata, Pima, and Yaqui peoples for thousands of years before any Spaniard wrote it down.
The technique, the tradition, and the story behind every dish.
Discover Culinary ExplorerIngredients
machaca (dried shredded beef from Sonora)
Quantity
8 ounces
pounded loose
manteca de cerdo (pork lard)
Quantity
3 tablespoons
white onion
Quantity
1 medium
finely diced
garlic cloves
Quantity
3
finely chopped
fresh chile colorado del norte (Anaheim or New Mexico green chile)
Quantity
2
roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped
Roma tomatoes
Quantity
2 medium
finely diced
fresh chile jalapeno or chile guero (optional)
Quantity
1
finely chopped
large eggs (optional)
Quantity
4
lightly beaten
dried Mexican oregano
Quantity
1/2 teaspoon
crumbled between your palms
kosher salt
Quantity
to taste
black pepper
Quantity
to taste
freshly ground
small Sonoran flour tortillas (tortillas de harina)
Quantity
12
warmed on a comal
salsa de chiltepin (optional)
Quantity
for serving
lime wedges (optional)
Quantity
for serving
frijoles puercos or refried pinto beans (optional)
Quantity
for serving
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| machaca (dried shredded beef from Sonora)pounded loose | 8 ounces |
| manteca de cerdo (pork lard) | 3 tablespoons |
| white onionfinely diced | 1 medium |
| garlic clovesfinely chopped | 3 |
| fresh chile colorado del norte (Anaheim or New Mexico green chile)roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped | 2 |
| Roma tomatoesfinely diced | 2 medium |
| fresh chile jalapeno or chile guero (optional)finely chopped | 1 |
| large eggs (optional)lightly beaten | 4 |
| dried Mexican oreganocrumbled between your palms | 1/2 teaspoon |
| kosher salt | to taste |
| black pepperfreshly ground | to taste |
| small Sonoran flour tortillas (tortillas de harina)warmed on a comal | 12 |
| salsa de chiltepin (optional) | for serving |
| lime wedges (optional) | for serving |
| frijoles puercos or refried pinto beans (optional) | for serving |
Equipment Needed
- •Heavy 10-inch cast iron skillet
- •Cast iron comal for warming tortillas
- •Wooden cutting board and a heavy knife or small skillet for pounding the machaca
- •Tongs for handling the tortillas on the comal
Instructions
- 1
Loosen the machaca
Place the machaca on a clean cutting board and pound it gently with the side of a heavy knife or the bottom of a small skillet. The strands should separate and fluff up. Good Sonoran machaca is dry, salty, and stringy, the color of dark brick. If yours is in stiff sheets, this pounding is what wakes it up. Some senoras in Hermosillo do this work in a molcajete. Either way, you want loose, airy strands, not a dense brick.
If your machaca is very salty, soak it in warm water for five minutes and squeeze it out before you pound it. Taste a strand first. The carne seca cured in the desert sun by the rancheros of the Sierra Madre is salty for a reason: salt is what kept it edible on horseback before refrigeration. - 2
Roast the chile colorado
If your chiles are not already roasted, char them directly over an open flame or under a hot broiler until the skin is blackened and blistered all over. Drop them in a bowl, cover with a plate, and let them sweat for ten minutes. The skins will slip off with your fingers. Pull out the stems and seeds and chop the flesh. The chile colorado del norte, what New Mexico calls Hatch and what Anaheim approximates, is the chile of the Sonoran kitchen. It is mild, sweet, and grassy. It is not a substitute for poblano. It is its own thing.
- 3
Render the lard and start the sofrito
Heat the manteca in a heavy 10-inch skillet, cast iron if you have it, over medium heat. When the lard shimmers, add the diced onion with a pinch of salt. Cook for four to five minutes until the onion turns translucent and the edges start to color. Add the garlic and cook one more minute until you can smell it. La manteca es el sabor. Vegetable oil will not give you the same depth. Sonoran ranch cooking runs on lard and beef tallow, not seed oils.
- 4
Build the chile and tomato base
Add the chopped chile colorado and the optional jalapeno to the pan. Cook for two minutes, stirring, so the chile gives up its sweetness into the lard. Add the diced tomato and the crumbled oregano. Cook for five to seven minutes, until the tomato breaks down and the mixture looks like a loose, chunky salsa with the fat starting to separate at the edges. This is the platform that carries the machaca. Get this part right and the rest cooks itself.
- 5
Add the machaca
Add the loosened machaca to the pan and stir to coat every strand in the sofrito. Lower the heat to medium-low. Cook for five to eight minutes, stirring often, until the machaca has absorbed the tomato and chile and softened into the mixture. Taste before you salt. The dried beef brings its own salt and you can always add more, but you cannot take it out. A grind of black pepper at this stage wakes everything up.
- 6
Fold in the eggs (optional)
If you are making the breakfast version, the machaca con huevo that every Sonoran rancho cook learned from her mother, push the machaca to one side of the pan. Pour the beaten eggs into the cleared space and let them set for thirty seconds. Then fold everything together with a spatula and cook one more minute, just until the eggs are barely set. Do not scramble them dry. The eggs should be soft and still glossy, holding the machaca together without overpowering it.
- 7
Warm the tortillas
Heat a dry comal over medium-high heat. Warm each flour tortilla for about fifteen seconds per side, until you see soft brown spots and the tortilla puffs slightly. The Sonoran flour tortilla is paper-thin and pliable, made with manteca and bread flour, and it is the right vessel for this taco. No me vengas con atajos. Corn tortillas are for other tacos in other states. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the norte belongs to the tortilla de harina.
- 8
Build the tacos at the table
Spoon a generous mound of machaca into the center of each warm tortilla. Fold and eat with your hands. Set salsa de chiltepin, lime wedges, and a pot of frijoles puercos on the table. The chiltepin is the wild desert chile of Sonora and it is hot, bright, and floral. A few drops on the taco is the signature finish. Asi se hace y punto.
Chef Tips
- •Real Sonoran machaca is hard to find outside the Mexican northwest. Look for carne seca at a Mexican carniceria, not at a supermarket. If your only option is the dehydrated beef sold in plastic packets at the chain stores, soak it in warm water for five minutes and squeeze it dry before you pound it. It is a compromise, not an upgrade. The good stuff is air-cured, salty, and almost mahogany in color.
- •The flour tortilla matters as much as the machaca. If you cannot find true Sonoran tortillas de harina, the paper-thin sobaqueras or the small everyday tortillas pressed by hand, look for a tortilleria that makes them with manteca de cerdo and bread flour. Mass-produced flour tortillas with hydrogenated shortening are a different food. The sobaquera is the highest expression of this tortilla tradition, but the small daily tortilla is what you fold around machaca.
- •Salsa de chiltepin is the table salsa for this taco. If you cannot find dried chiltepin, salsa de molcajete made with chile de arbol and tomato is a reasonable substitute. Do not reach for green tomatillo salsa. That is a southern salsa for southern tacos.
- •Make double the machaca filling. It freezes well, reheats in a skillet with another spoonful of lard, and feeds a family for a week of breakfasts. This is what made it the working ranch food it always was.
Advance Preparation
- •The machaca filling can be made two days ahead and refrigerated. Reheat in a skillet with a spoonful of lard. The flavor deepens overnight as the chile and tomato settle into the meat.
- •The cooked machaca filling freezes for up to two months. Portion it into single-meal containers so you can pull out exactly what you need for a weekday breakfast.
- •Roast and peel the chile colorado the day before. Stored in the refrigerator in a small jar, it is ready to chop into the pan when you start cooking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nutrition Information
1 serving (about 215g)
Calories
455 calories
Total Fat
21 g
Saturated Fat
8 g
Trans Fat
0 g
Unsaturated Fat
13 g
Cholesterol
150 mg
Sodium
1580 mg
Total Carbohydrates
35 g
Dietary Fiber
3 g
Sugars
3 g
Protein
29 g
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