03/16/2021
Tortillas de Harina
You can't talk about flour tortillas without talking about White Sonora Wheat (the oldest wheat variety in North America) and my beloved Sonoran desert.
I grew up eating flour tortillas, going to an asadero, ordering tacos and being asked if I wanted flour or corn was the norm. Of course not every taco favors flour just like not every taco goes on corn, they both have their own place at the table. Sonoran tortillas are soft, chewy, buttery, yet thin. It's comfort food. This is how my mom shows us love. She makes tortillas only with flour bought in Sonora, Mexico. So, this is where I start my tortilla journey. And really I've been trying to make flour tortillas for years on and off mixing high gluten flours with AP, pastry and everything in between with no real luck.
I've been following this wheat variety since 2012(?) when I first read an article about a farmer finding the wheat berry in one of the many abandoned flour mills in southern Arizona. This is when I started doing some research and saw how this story ties with my roots. Some claim Juan Bautista de Anza distributed wheat in the late 1700's when traveling from the states of Sinaloa, Sonora in to what is now Arizona and California establishing Catholic missions, but there is record that Bautista and Pedro Font were impressed by the already established agriculture in Yuma by the Quechan and that it included wheat. So if not the Spanish perhaps the Portuguese when they "explored" the area in the 1540's? What I do know is that while the wheat variety may have been brought over from Europe it was the Natives that introduced it to it's quintessential Sonoran cuisine. Made it the predominant wheat variety in the southwest until the 1940's (you know refined white flour).
I have included a few extra pictures from a couple years ago of the Juan Bautista de Anza trail and a view of the old Mission Puerto de Purisima Concepción from the Yuma Territorial Prison in Yuma, Arizona. And of course a cute picture of my nephew, Isaiah, making a baby flour tortilla at Nana's house.
Quieres tus tacos de asada en harina oh maiz? There is no wrong answer
