Ground Truthing

Reading, recipes and research can only take you so far.

Hey there from Hermosillo.

Sometimes you just have to be there.

I’ve written about my love, and research, into Mexican cuisine before, and a recent trip to the Sonoran capital of Hermosillo and its surroundings cemented one of the prime truths of knowledge: Experiential knowledge is the crushed chiltepin on top of the plate of understanding.

Sonora loves its chiltepin chiles, little wild orbs of demon flame mostly (but not always) harvested red and ripe, and then dried. Their heat lights you up like a magnesium flare, then dissipates quickly. They are on every table in Sonora as a condiment, and across the border in Arizona, you can almost always get some if you ask for some. Best to do that in Spanish. Tienen chiltepines?

Baja and Sonora are the Mexican states that fascinate me most. They represent a stark juxtaposition of desert and sea, beef and fish, vaqueros and pescaderos.

I’ve studied the regional cuisine extensively. I’ve read damn near every cookbook that covers the three states — Baja, Baja Sur and Sonora — in English and in Spanish. I’ve watched hundreds of YouTube videos of people making these states’ specialties: sobaquera tortillas, machaca, smoked fish, discada (a sort of Mexican wok cooking over open fire), caldo de queso, fish tacos… you get the point.

I follow cooks and artisans and other food researchers from Mexico on social media. I have friends from these states. And whenever I meet people from the region, I ask them about the food.

All of this has helped me grok the cuisine better than most Americans. But nothing beats ground truthing. Nothing.

Eating and drinking and talking with the people making the food then and there provides that sabor, that flavor, that cold text or distant video lacks. It’s how every outsider wrote cookbooks about other cuisines for more than a century. Only recently have researchers and writers like me been able to remotely “taste” a cuisine.

Let me state clearly that remote research is still incredibly valuable. It allows you to see and understand the variability within a recipe in a way that would be impossible if the only thing you did was wander around eating. We simply lack the stomach space, and most of us lack the time and money, to live in a place for years and years sampling the food and drink all day.

Remote research can also help you hone your real-life search. You can see someone making something amazing online, then visit to sample and talk with the makers. I did this in Ensenada, Baja, with a smoked fish establishment. Talking with them helped me refine my own recipe for smoked marlin or swordfish, which I had been working on. My recipe isn’t theirs, but I was able to glean a few tips from them to make mine better than it was.

To carry on that example, we visited other places that sold smoked fish and most of the others used an artificial red color on their fish to simulate the real smoke ring. Google “marlin ahumado” and you’ll see what I mean.

Being there also gives you a much better chance of stumbling on things, in this case taquerias with big lines (a sign of quality), or menu items you didn’t know existed.

My friend Charlie de la Rosa and I had both experiences in Sonora.

We went looking for coyotas, the pie-dough cookie filled with brown sugar, milk fudge, nuts or jam. They seems to mostly be centered on a neighborhood called Villa de Seris, and there are at least a dozen shops making the pastry. Everyone we’d spoken with recommended Doña Cuyo’s coyotas over all else, even the more famous Doña Maria’s. Local knowledge again!

Alas, we got there too early. But there was a little puesto, a pop up restaurant, called Tortilleria San Ramon nearby where some ladies were making tortillas. The menu had the usual burros with machaca (think beef jerky fluff), carne con chile, the best refried beans I’ve eaten in a very long time — as well as the nectar of the gods, freshly brewed coffee.

Charlie wanted some soup, so we asked the lady running the tortilleria where a good place might be. She pointed us to a hole in the wall about a half mile away. There was a line. Good sign. We asked for barbacoa, which, oddly, we could eat as a soup. I’d never seen that before. It was good, like a cross between birria and caldo de res.

Sonoran barbacoa in its broth.

But the burros were better, and Charlie and I ended up eating breakfast at Tortilleria San Ramon every morning; we brought some tortillas back, too. (Yes, you can bring tortillas across the border.)

Nothing was surprising on San Ramon’s menu; I’d either made everything on it at home, or at least knew about it. The ladies wouldn’t give up their refried beans recipe, but I suspect it used sauce and fat from the carne con chile, similar to frijoles con veneno I had in Nuevo Leon.

Later that day we went to a place recommended by many of our friends, Tacos Leñador. We went for the carne asada — the crown jewel of Sonoran cuisine — and found several other dishes that I would never have known about otherwise.

The first was dead simple, but really good, especially with lots of Tecate beer. Carne seca, basically jerky, heated up on the comal (griddle) and served alongside lime wedges and chiltepin salsa. The jerky was leathery but not brittle, and it was a spectacular appetizer to eat while waiting for tacos and watching Harry Potter in Spanish on the nearby TV screen.

Carne seca appetizer at Tacos Leñador.

The second was the one and only place I saw nopales in our trip. A flour tortilla, with a slab of cooked, baby prickly pear cactus paddle, topped with chopped ribeye cooked medium, some more chopped nopales, and a healthy amount of queso asadero, a melty, buttery cheese. More chiltepin salsa and it was perfect. I’d never seen or heard of this taco, and maybe it’s “not a thing” in Sonora, but it was possibly the best taco of the whole trip.

Ribeye and nopales taco.

One other curious thing you can encounter while on the ground are versions of a dish you might actually cook better. This isn’t surprising when you think about it. At least in my case, I am a professionally trained cook who has cooked Mexican food for years. I am not without skills. And chances are some of you know your way around Mexican food, too. Sometimes you just walk into a place that serves a dish you know and like in, well, a lackluster fashion. This carne con chile is one example.

Meh carne con chile, but really nice fresh cheese and chiles.

But even there, the plate is instructive. Really thin, soupy refried pinto beans, a round of rice with corn kernels (hadn’t seen that before), freshly made queso fresco with roasted and peeled serranos on top. It was a good Sunday supper, although not outstanding.

Mexican Food Coma, Part I

And there were lots of other examples of all three discoveries: Chicharron de res (think chislic) tacos, a crazy good cheese appetizer of queso menonito (Mennonite-made cheese that you can sear on a griddle) drizzled with local honey and minced chiles morita, and lorenzas — the one corn tortilla dish we saw a lot of — where the tortilla has melted cheese on it, then griddled until it’s a tostada and topped with, yes, more beef.

We got a chance to talk with people selling raw ingredients, too: fresh sugar cane, dried chiltepin chiles, cubiertos de calabaza (candied winter squash), ristras of dried red chiles, peanuts, walnuts, jamoncillo and more.

Bottom line? To really understand a cuisine, you need to interact with the people who make it, and not just master the mechanics of cooking their food. I took another step towards that on this trip.

There will be more. A lot more. Just as soon as I can.