Carne con Chile Colorado Sonorense

This is a Sonoran dish. Not from Mexico City, not from Jalisco, not from anywhere south of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Carne con chile colorado is noroeste cooking, the food of the cattle ranches and wheat fields of Sonora, and that geography decides everything about it: the beef instead of pork, the wheat tortilla instead of corn, the chile California that gives the stew its name and its red.

Chile California is what most of the rest of Mexico calls chile colorado. It is the dried form of the Anaheim chile, mild, fruity, and the color of clay tile. In Sonora, this chile is the workhorse. You buy it in long red strings at the Mercado Municipal in Hermosillo, you toast it on a dry comal, and you build the sauce around it. The guajillo gives backbone. The ancho gives a touch of sweetness. The California gives the dish its identity. Take it out and you have a different stew from a different place.

The meat is shank. Chambarete, with the bone and the marrow still in. You brown it hard, you simmer it slowly with the broth, and then you marry it with the chile paste fried in lard until the sauce darkens and clings to the meat. La manteca es el sabor. The Sonoran cooks I learned this from in El Recodo and Ures do not apologize for the lard, do not apologize for the wheat tortilla, do not apologize for serving this with a stack of frijoles puercos and a Tecate. This is their food. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

My mother did not cook Sonoran. She was from Jalisco. But there was a page in her notebook from a friend in Magdalena de Kino, written in blue ink, with one underlined instruction: 'No me vengas con atajos con los chiles.' Toast them, soak them, fry the paste in lard. Asi se hace y punto.