Arizona
4 dishes from Arizona, cooked the way the place cooks them.
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Sonoran Carne Seca
Top round cured with lime, garlic and salt, dried until it snaps, then pounded to shreds and fried with onion, green chile and tomato — the Sonoran ranch way of keeping beef in a country with no winter, rebuilt for an oven because the open-air method is no longer one I can tell you to use.
- Total
- 9 hr
- Serves
- 4
- Calories
- 215 per serving
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Arizona Cheese Crisp
A twelve-inch flour tortilla crisped empty on a bare oven rack, then covered edge to edge with grated cheese and put back until it runs — two ingredients, no pan, no fold, and a dish so local that two state newspaper archives and the whole federal publishing record have never once printed its name.
- Total
- 15 min
- Serves
- 4
- Calories
- 375 per serving
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Tucson Chimichanga
A wide flour tortilla folded round shredded braised beef, pinto beans and cheese and deep-fried until it blisters — the dish federal labeling rules call a Sonoran specialty, Tucson calls its own, and the earliest printed origin account dates to the 1950s rather than to 1922.
- Total
- 3 hr 10 min
- Serves
- 4
- Calories
- 800 per serving
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Sonoran Hot Dog
A bacon-wrapped frankfurter in a soft split bolillo under whole pinto beans, grilled and raw onion, tomato, mayonnaise and mustard, with a blistered yellow chile alongside — Hermosillo's dish as Tucson has sold it since the 1990s, with no printed ancestor and the quantities worked out here.
- Total
- 30 min
- Serves
- 4
- Calories
- 720 per serving