As a kid increasing up successful Hermosillo, the biggest metropolis successful the arid bluish Mexican authorities of Sonora, Ruben Leal took the region’s signature flour tortillas for granted. You could find them not lone successful tortillerias—where seasoned makers would flip them, sometimes bare-handed, connected a ripping-hot comal—but besides astatine immoderate of the city’s abbarotes, oregon country stores, wherever “they person caller ones that the tortilla woman dropped disconnected aboriginal successful the morning,” Leal told me. Tortillas de harina, made with freshly milled wheat and pork abdominous oregon rootlike shortening, were indispensable for staples similar tacos, burritos, and caramelos—a Sonoran quesadilla made with carne asada—but they were besides delicious capable to devour plain.
In 2002, Leal moved to Tucson, wherever helium studied selling astatine the University of Arizona and met the pistillate helium would marry. They moved to Austin, wherever Leal got his tortilla hole astatine the Texas market concatenation H-E-B, which makes them fresh. A fewer years later, the mates moved again, this clip to Lawrence, Kansas, a assemblage municipality immoderate forty miles westbound of Kansas City, not acold from wherever Leal’s woman grew up. The area’s Mexican colonisation is comparatively small, and the crockery known arsenic the “Kansas City taco” is simply a mid-century relic: a deep-fried, hard maize ammunition with crushed beef, shredded lettuce, and food powder. “I kept getting farther distant from the borderline and the tortillas kept getting worse,” Leal told maine recently, lasting successful the Lawrence office of his company, Caramelo, which has lately emerged arsenic 1 of the champion producers of tortillas successful the U.S.
In the halfway of a cavernous room, an worker was loading dozens of golf-ball-size mounds of dough into an tremendous instrumentality reminiscent of an aboriginal printing press, outfitted with blistery alloy plates that flattened and cooked them, past spat the finished products onto a agelong mesh conveyor belt. A level instrumentality cooled the tortillas—Caramelo produces immoderate 15 1000 flour tortillas a day—as they were ferried to a packaging station. Leal, who is forty, tall, and broad-shouldered, with a brace of delicate chemoreceptor rings and a debased ponytail, plucked 1 disconnected the loop and handed it to me. It steamed mildly arsenic I spot into it—stretchy, supple, and gossamer-thin, pocked with bubbles and affluent with the creamy tang of carnal fat.
The nighttime before, I’d eaten a burrito, made with a Caramelo tortilla, astatine a Kansas City edifice called Tacos Valentina. I told Leal that the tortilla—which was charred and filled with beans and chile-colorado-stewed pork—was astir arsenic flaky arsenic a laminated French pastry. Leal, laughing, said, “Yeah, immoderate radical telephone them the croissants of tortillas.” His machinery is customized to let for exacting somesthesia control. “Because our tortillas are precise specific, a batch of machines don’t similar them,” helium said. “They puff up truly easily, due to the fact that of the h2o and abdominous content.” Containing the vigor means that the tortillas support their structural integrity, though, to Leal’s chagrin, it sacrifices the burnished freckles you’d spot connected a handmade version.
Leal decided to effort making his ain tortillas successful 2014, connected a time erstwhile helium felt peculiarly homesick and bored by his job, arsenic an head successful the chemistry section astatine the University of Kansas. His archetypal attempt, guided by a YouTube video, missed the people connected some spirit and texture, but helium got the wide idea: mix, roll, flatten, cook. “I didn’t cognize I liked moving with nutrient until I moved to Kansas,” helium told me. As helium experimented with antithetic proportions of flour, water, salt, and fat, helium became obsessed. After his parent died, successful 2016, helium claimed an aged tabletop electrical tortilla property from her room successful Hermosillo; the instrumentality gave his tortillas the azygous signifier and texture he’d been looking for, and besides allowed him to dramatically summation his output. He began to wonderment if helium could merchantability them.
Before helium had bags oregon a logo, Leal met with buyers astatine the Merc, Lawrence’s coöperative market store, toting a tortilla warmer afloat of freshly cooked samples. The buyers instantly agreed to commencement carrying them. Not agelong afterward, helium offered samples to Alejandra de la Fuente, a autochthonal of Mexico City and the cook and proprietor of a Kansas City edifice called Red Kitchen. She had been hunting arsenic acold arsenic Denver for a caller flour tortilla that met her standards, and was connected the verge of giving up. “As soon arsenic helium pulled retired the tortilla, I was, like, ‘That’s precisely what I was looking for,’ ” she told me. Soon, Leal was connected the hook for dozens of tortillas a week. After clocking retired from his time job, helium would walk hours astatine a rented commercialized kitchen, and past proceed making tortillas astatine home, sometimes until 2 a.m. “My woman was, like, ‘Why is it truthful smoky successful here?’ ” helium recalled. (They’re present amicably divorced.)
Today, Leal supplies tortillas to restaurants, specialty shops, and location cooks astir the country, successful a scope of sizes and made with a assortment of fats, including avocado lipid and duck fat. Many of his clients are successful New York, including the Mexican maestro cook Enrique Olvera, who uses them astatine Esse Taco, his Brooklyn taqueria, for burritos stuffed with grilled rib oculus oregon smoked mushrooms. When I asked Olvera what helium liked astir the Caramelo tortilla, helium shrugged arsenic if it were obvious. “It’s similar getting a lukewarm hug from your grandmother,” helium said. Leal told maine proudly, “One of the astir flattering things is that restaurants from Mexico are mounting up businesses successful the U.S., and they’re reaching retired to america for tortillas. And they adjacent archer america that ours are amended than what they’re getting down there.”
For overmuch of my life, I was a corn-tortilla partisan. All the exceptional tortillas I’d eaten were made from sweet, nutty masa, the basal for the tantalizingly restrained tacos you mightiness get astatine a thoroughfare cart, with conscionable a scattering of carnitas, onions, and cilantro. I associated flour tortillas with maximalist dishes astatine middling Tex-Mex restaurants, and with the “ethnic” aisle astatine the market store, wherever the offerings are mostly airy and doughy, packed with preservatives that rob them of texture and flavor. That changed erstwhile I visited a taqueria successful L.A. called Sonoratown, opened successful 2016 by Jennifer Feltham and her husband, Teodoro Diaz-Rodriguez, Jr., a autochthonal of Sonora. (The sanction besides refers to the bygone L.A. vicinity of Sonoratown, wherever a assemblage of Mexican immigrants settled aft the Gold Rush.) The tortillas there, made with flour that Feltham was commuting to Mexico each week oregon truthful to buy, redefined the signifier for me: chewy and pliable, truthful bladed they were astir transparent, salty and shiny with luscious pork fat. To devour lone 1 would person felt similar torture.
Feltham and Diaz-Rodriguez person bonded with Leal implicit their shared passion. “I’m drawn to radical that are obsessed with 1 thing, similar the feline who does our chorizo,” Feltham told me. “When we archetypal met, helium was, like, ‘I’d emotion to person a girlfriend, but I person truthful overmuch chorizo drying successful my flat close present that I wouldn’t person anyplace to bring her.’ ” As tacos person go cardinal to U.S. nutrient culture, they’ve travel to animate the benignant of connoisseurship erstwhile reserved for vino and cheese. José Ralat, who serves arsenic Texas Monthly’s taco editor, is 1 specified expert. He told maine that a defining prime of a Sonoran tortilla is “gauziness—I tin spot the prima done them.” Recounting a caller sojourn to Hermosillo, helium said, “The tortillas determination are an astonishing vessel, due to the fact that they’re truthful bladed yet truthful strong. They carnivore truthful overmuch weight, not lone with the nutrient but with the history.”
In pre-colonial Mexico, maize was beloved by, and adjacent ineffable to, Indigenous populations, including the Aztecs. But Spanish settlers favored wheat, which was autochthonal to the Fertile Crescent, and which they associated with the Eucharist. In bluish Mexico, this bias, combined with a clime that was amended suited to increasing wheat than corn, resulted successful the ascendance of the flour tortilla. Across the borderline successful Texas, and successful different parts of the Southwest, flour tortillas carnivore a scope of determination quirks. Ralat described “the arsenic beautiful, thick, chewy, futon-like San Antonio tortilla,” which helium likened, affectionately, to lukewarm laundry.
As it happens, Leal is not the lone shaper of Sonoran-style tortillas successful the Kansas City area. By coincidence, Marissa Gencarelli, who was calved and raised successful Obregón, the second-biggest metropolis successful Sonora, started a tortilleria successful 2016, called Yoli, with her husband, Mark, a Kansas City native. The 2 companies look to bask a steadfast consciousness of competition, connected which some founders, successful Midwestern form, politely declined to comment. The Gencarellis started with corn. After they added flour to their repertoire, Leal added maize to his. Both companies precocious began offering totopos, oregon maize chips, which stock support abstraction astatine the Merc. Last fall, the Gencarellis, who won a James Beard grant successful 2023, introduced a café and store called Yoli Loncheria; Leal is preparing to unfastened his ain burrito counter, called Ignacio, aft his Mexican hairless dog.
Gencarelli told maine that she sees similarities betwixt Kansas City and Obregón, some of which person “a small burr successful their belly” from being successful the shadows of bigger cities, and are known for agriculture, particularly wheat. “The temperament is precise similar, assured but understated,” she said. “Like, yeah—laugh astir us, archer america that we’re flyover country, but it’s O.K. We cognize what we got.” Leal has remained successful Lawrence for applicable reasons—he and his ex person 2 children, and it’s cheaper to support up with mounting request for his tortillas than it would beryllium successful Austin oregon New York—but he’s travel to spot it arsenic home. During my visit, Leal and I drove successful his vintage Jeep to 1900 Barker, a java store connected Lawrence’s main drag. Leal got what helium described arsenic “a McDonald’s meal sandwich connected steroids.” I tried to bid a meal burrito, made with a Caramelo tortilla, but they were sold out. Leal confessed that helium “very rarely” eats tortillas these days. “They’re present now,” helium said, laughing, “so I’m utilized to it.” ♦
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