Carne asada recipe traces roots to female grill experts
Minerva Orduño Rincón calls the scent of carne asada “the Sonoran Batsignal.” It’s the smell of roasted chiles, beefsteak and smoky mesquite that calls everyone for miles, she says.
Orduño Rincón, who cooked in restaurants in the Valley for eight years, grew up in Sonora, Mexico. The smell of carne asada takes her back to her childhood in Hermosillo, running around the backyard with her older sister, chasing after the “very spoiled” neighborhood cats.
“Scent is a powerful driver of memory,” she says. “With food, you’re instantly thinking about where you ate it 10 years ago, the person who made it. We can build much stronger memories with our sense of smell than even our taste.”
Orduño Rincón lives in Tempe now with her husband and 4-year-old daughter. She teaches a variety of cooking classes at Sur la Table at Scottsdale Fashion Square and hosts Sonoran cooking workshops in Tucson and Tubac, a community in southern Arizona.
It’s easy for people to romanticize the vaquero culture behind carne asada, although she didn’t grow up in that traditional lifestyle, she says. Still, carne asada connects her to the women in her family who have tended the grill for generations. It also connects her to her roots in Sonora, where people rais livestock in the region’s arid climate and rough terrain.
Sonora’s deep connection to carne asada
The state of Sonora has a more than
500-mile long coastline, so when Orduño Rincón thinks of Sonoran food, she thinks about seafood first.
But good quality beef is also a point of pride when it comes Sonoran cuisine, she says. Traditional cattle ranching has dominated northwest Mexico since the 1600s and more than 80% of Sonora is grazed by livestock, High Country News reports.
In one episode of Netflix series “The Taco Chronicles,” the documentary team goes to her hometown of Hermosillo, as well as surrounding cities and towns, to find the best carne asada tacos.
Orduño Rincón’s early memories of carne asada involve birthday parties and Sunday gatherings at her family’s house, the smoke of mesquite charcoal burning wafting from one corner of the yard where her father built a grill behind an enormous fig tree.
Before cooking the meat, her father, Fermín, marinades the arrachera, or skirt steak, in a Mexican lager. Orduño Rincón picked up the beer marinade technique from him.
“What’s funny is that we all make the same dishes,” she says. “We all make them very differently. My great frustration with anyone in my family is that nobody ever writes anything down. I am a huge advocate for writing recipes so people in your family can use them.”
Generations of women who grill
Her grandmother on her mother’s side, Igdelina, is also a grill cook. Sometimes Orduño Rincon’s dad tries to take over, insisting her grandmother rest, but this results in an argument — and nana usually wins, Orduño Rincón says.
From her mother Irene’s stories, Orduño Rincón learned her great-grandmother Elodia, now deceased, was also a grill cook. Elodia had a wood stove and oven in her home in Mexico. When there was leftover carne asada, Elodia dried the meat out in the oven. Once dry, Elodia hung the meat in the sun to dry more and later pounded the beef to make carne machaca, a dried meat dish that’s “another Sonoran staple,” Orduño Rincón says.
Before refrigeration, this was a way to have a supply of meat around when nothing fresh was available, she explains.
Most of what Orduño Rincón has learned about cooking came from observing other people over the years, but since moving to the U.S., Orduño Rincón sometimes finds her life story doesn’t fit people’s expectations of a chef from Mexico.
People envision someone who came from a large and traditional, churchgoing family that butchers their own animals, or makes all their tortillas and masa from scratch, she says. But her family’s not Catholic and they often bought tortillas from any of the local tortillerias around, she describes.
“I think there’s an expectation of a bucolic story behind the person, that you can’t just be someone that’s Mexican and good at cooking, that you have to have a rural background or some extraordinary backstory,” Orduño Rincón says.
‘It’s important to carry on food memory’
Regardless, she still values the skills she has learned from her family, such as learning how to make ceviche and carne asada from her father. She wants to pass those skills down to her own daughter, even if it’s just so her daughter can feed herself more than macaroni and cheese from the box.
“It drives me crazy that I don’t have my great-grandma’s food memories or her recipes,” Orduño Rincón says. “I didn’t get to watch her cook. That’s the aspect that’s important to me: To carry the memory from one member of the family to the other because unfortunately, we lose that so quickly.”
In her workshops, she also focuses on cuisine from her home state. In November, she’ll teach a class in Tubac about how to make gallina pinta, a beefbased soup with hominy and pinto beans. Later she’s teaching a class in Tucson on how to make Sonoran-style tamales.
“Food can sometimes be seen as more of a chore, rather than something enjoyable,” she says. “I see that a lot in my cooking classes where nobody has taught people how to cook. Parents were busy working trying to provide for the family. For me it’s important to carry on food memory.”