Thin, supple rounds of wheat flour and lard, cooked on a dry comal until they balloon with heat and brown in golden patches: warm, slightly stretchy, with the faint richness of lard. The flour tortilla of Northern Mexico is the other tortilla: the wheat one, born of Spanish colonial wheat and used for burritos, quesadillas, and the Sonoran hot dog.
Origin: Northern Mexico (Sonora & Chihuahua)
From the journey of Wheat.
When Spanish missionaries introduced wheat to Mexico in the 1520s, indigenous communities of Northern Mexico adapted the corn tortilla technique to the new grain, creating the flour tortilla. While corn tortillas remained dominant in central and southern Mexico (where corn civilisation originated), Northern Mexico, particularly Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila, developed a wheat-based flour tortilla culture that would later spread across the border into the American Southwest. The Sonoran flour tortilla is considered the finest: stretched extremely thin, as large as 50cm, and nearly translucent when held to light. Mexican immigrants carried flour tortillas into California and Texas, where they became central to Tex-Mex and Californian cuisine.
Mapping Culinary History
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Journey Point Map Key