Tortillas Sobaqueras de Sonora

Sobaqueras are from Sonora. Specifically from the wheat-growing valleys of the northwest, from Caborca, Hermosillo, Magdalena de Kino, where the ranches stretch into the desert and the bread of the day is flour, not corn. This is the north. Wheat country. The corn-versus-flour argument that people from central Mexico like to have ends at the Sonora border. Up here, the tortilla is flour and it is the size of a record album.

The name comes from sobaco, the armpit, because the technique is to stretch the dough across the cook's forearm and rotate it slowly until it thins to translucency. You can see the comal through it. A finished sobaquera measures 14 to 16 inches across in a home kitchen, and a meter across in the hands of a senora who has done this every day of her life. I have watched women in Caborca stretch dough so thin you could read a newspaper through it without tearing a single seam.

The dough is flour, lard, salt, and hot water. Hot water, not cold. That is the Sonora trick and it is the difference between a tortilla that stretches and a tortilla that rips. Manteca de cerdo is the fat. Not butter, not vegetable shortening, not olive oil. La manteca es el sabor and it is also what makes the dough pliable enough to survive the stretch. My mother did not make sobaqueras, she was from Jalisco and Jalisco is its own tortilla conversation, but the first time I ate one in Hermosillo, folded around carne asada straight off a mesquite fire, I understood why the north defends its bread. Cada estado, su propia cocina. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.