Northern Mexico Food & Traditional Cuisine

Northern Mexican food is the version most familiar abroad, and it is distinctly different from the cooking of the centre and south.

The first difference is wheat. The north is cattle and wheat country rather than maize country, and the flour tortilla — large, thin, pliable, made with lard — belongs here. The burrito, the quesadilla made with a flour tortilla, and the whole northern repertoire follow from it, and Sonora’s paper-thin tortillas de agua, stretched to half a metre across, are a genuine craft.

The second is beef. This is ranching country, and the cooking is built around grilling over mesquite — carne asada is a social institution as much as a dish, a weekend gathering around a grill in a yard.

The third is restraint with chilli. Northern food is less hot than southern, relying on smoke, salt and the meat itself, with chilli often used dried and mild.

Cheese matters here in a way it does not further south, and the north makes Mexico’s best.

Cabrito al pastor is Monterrey’s dish: a young milk-fed goat splayed on an iron rod and roasted upright beside mesquite coals for hours. It is the centre of a Nuevo Leon Sunday and is taken extremely seriously.

Carne asada — thin beef grilled over mesquite, chopped, and eaten in flour tortillas with grilled spring onions, guacamole and salsa. The gathering is the point as much as the food.

Machaca, beef dried in the desert air then pounded and shredded, rehydrated and scrambled with egg, tomato and chilli for breakfast — a preservation method from before refrigeration that survived because people liked it.

Burritos in their original form: a flour tortilla wrapped around one filling, usually machaca, beans or chile con carne. The enormous multi-ingredient version is American.

Discada, several meats cooked together on a disc harrow blade over a fire, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Also: gorditas from Durango, Chihuahua’s apple products, and coyotas, the Sonoran piloncillo-filled pastry.

Carne asada is a social form. Weekend grilling in a yard or a park, with beer, is how northern families and friends spend Saturday, and being invited to one is the best food experience the region offers.

Tortilla shops sell flour tortillas by weight, made that morning, and the difference between those and packaged ones is the difference between bread and toast-in-a-bag.

Monterrey’s cabrito restaurants are institutions with their own etiquette — the cut you order matters, and the riñonada with the kidney is the prized one.

Markets in Chihuahua, Hermosillo and Saltillo sell dried beef, cheeses, chiltepin peppers and the region’s wheat products.

Mennonite cheese from the colonies near Cuauhtemoc in Chihuahua is a genuine northern product — a mild white cheese sold in wheels, made by German-speaking communities who arrived from Canada in the 1920s.

Purified water is universal; tap water is not drunk.

Northern Mexico holds the oldest winery in the Americas and the origin of one of the world’s best-known spirits.

Casa Madero in the Valle de Parras, Coahuila, has been making wine since 1597 and is the oldest winery in the Western Hemisphere, still producing. The valley is high, dry and cool at night, and the Parras region is enjoying a genuine revival with several newer producers alongside it.

Sotol is the northern spirit and deserves to be better known: distilled from the Dasylirion desert spoon plant rather than agave, it is the traditional drink of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango, with a green, mineral character quite unlike tequila or mezcal. It holds a Mexican denomination of origin.

Bacanora is Sonora’s agave spirit, illegal for most of the twentieth century and legalised in 1992.

Beer is the north’s everyday drink and its industry: Monterrey’s Cuauhtemoc brewery, founded in 1890, is the source of much of what Mexico drinks.