Alambres de Carne Asada Sonorenses

This is Sonora. The northwest, the desert, cattle country. Forget what you know about Mexican food being corn and chile. Up here, the staple is wheat, the meat is beef, and the smoke is mesquite. The alambre is what a Sonoran family puts on the grill on a Saturday afternoon when the cousins come over and the carne asada turns into something more.

The word alambre means wire, and traditionally the meat went on a metal skewer over the coals. The modern Sonoran version, the one I learned in a backyard outside Hermosillo, builds on a cast iron skillet set straight on the grill so the bacon fat, the beef juices, and the mesquite smoke have somewhere to gather. The vegetables sear in that fat. The cheese melts over the top. The tortilla picks it all up.

Flour tortillas are not a Tex-Mex invention. They are northern Mexican, period. The wheat came with the Spanish in the 1600s and Sonora's dry climate made it grow better than corn. The tortillas de harina sonorenses, thin enough to read through, paper-soft, the size of a dinner plate, are the bread of an entire region. If anyone tells you flour tortillas are not Mexican, they have never been north of San Luis Potosi.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not make alambres. I learned this dish from a woman named Dona Esperanza in a rancho outside Magdalena de Kino, working a comal over a mesquite fire with her two grown sons turning the meat. She told me three things and I am telling them to you now: good beef, real mesquite, and asadero that pulls. No me vengas con atajos.