Exploring Hermosillo, northern Mexico's great unsung food city
HERMOSILLO, Mexico - The historic colonia of Villa de Seris - a quiet neighborhood just south of the Rio Sonora in the city of Hermosillo - Gregoria Guadalupe Fraga Yanez spends her weekends making tortillas.
Yanez - the head tortillera at Burros y Tortillas San Ramon, a popular stand on a leafy corner in Villa de Seris - grabs a smooth ball of dough from a baking tray and uses a rolling pin to flatten it into more or less the shape of a dinner plate. She then stretches it by hand, draping it over her forearm, where it hangs like a thin, loose bed sheet. Finally she flings it onto a hot comal, a huge, rounded steel dome constructed from a repurposed tractor disc blade. (The use of reconfigured farm equipment is common in Sonoran campfire cooking.) The tortilla lands on the dome with Olympic-level precision; the dough puffs up and starts to blister.
Made from just wheat flour, salt, water and lard, and stretched to what seems an unreasonably thin consistency, a proper Sonoran tortilla sparks a sort of ephemeral pleasure spiral: You are consumed with the sense of eating something unequivocally buttery, light and tender; something so rich and finely honed you can almost feel your neurons inflate with pleasure.
Yanez makes the thin, extra-large wheat flour tortillas commonly known as sobaqueras. The name, a derivation of the Spanish word " sobaco,"
