The New Yorker:

Some of the best Sonoran-style tortillas in the U.S. are being made far from the border, in a college town forty miles outside Kansas City.

By Hannah Goldfield

As a kid growing up in Hermosillo, the biggest city in the arid northern Mexican state of Sonora, Ruben Leal took the region’s signature flour tortillas for granted. You could find them not only in tortillerias—where veteran makers would flip them, sometimes bare-handed, on a ripping-hot comal—but also at any of the city’s abbarotes, or corner stores, where “they have fresh ones that the tortilla lady dropped off early in the morning,” Leal told me. Tortillas de harina, made with freshly milled wheat and pork fat or vegetable shortening, were essential for staples like tacos, burritos, and caramelos—a Sonoran quesadilla made with carne asada—but they were also delicious enough to eat plain.

In 2002, Leal moved to Tucson, where he studied marketing at the University of Arizona and met the woman he would marry. They moved to Austin, where Leal got his tortilla fix at the Texas grocery chain H-E-B, which makes them fresh. A few years later, the couple moved again, this time to Lawrence, Kansas, a college town some forty miles west of Kansas City, not far from where Leal’s wife grew up. The area’s Mexican population is relatively small, and the dish known as the “Kansas City taco” is a mid-century relic: a deep-fried, hard corn shell with ground beef, shredded lettuce, and cheese powder. “I kept getting farther away from the border and the tortillas kept getting worse,” Leal told me recently, standing in the Lawrence headquarters of his company, Caramelo, which has lately emerged as one of the best producers of tortillas in the U.S.

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