Chimichanga

A flour tortilla goes into hot oil folded tight on all sides, and within a couple of minutes it surfaces as a different object. The surface has puffed into blisters, the color has moved from pale wheat to deep gold, and the whole parcel crackles faintly as it drains on the rack. That transformation is the chimichanga, a burrito of the Sonora and southern Arizona borderland that spends its last stage in a fryer. The thin, wide wheat tortilla of that region suits the job, because it crisps without turning thick or doughy, and a cook who folds it into a sealed envelope keeps the oil out and the steam in.

The filling is cooked for the fryer, which means it is cooked drier than a burrito would need. Shredded beef braised down until tender, dried machaca pulled into strands, or chicken in a thick chile paste all work, with refried beans and a little cheese to bind them. Excess liquid would steam the inside of the shell and soften it from within, so the cook reduces the juices and lets the beans glue the rest together. At the plate the sauce goes on last and goes on light, a ladle of red or green chile and a blanket of melted cheese, so that the top softens while the underside keeps its snap.

Cutting into one is a small event at the table. The knife meets resistance, then a crack, and a breath of hot steam carrying toasted wheat and chile rises out of the break. The first bite is all contrasts of temperature: a scalding, shattering rim, a soft bean-and-beef center, and the cold sour cream and guacamole spooned over the top, which cool the palate between mouthfuls of fat. Eaten with a fork on a hot plate in a dining room in Tucson or Hermosillo, the chimichanga is a sit-down dish and it keeps its crunch for about as long as the first round of conversation.

Sonoran cooking supplies most of its vocabulary. The wheat tortilla is the staple of the north, carne seca and machaca are the dried-beef traditions of its ranch country, and the chile sauces that cover the plate belong to the same kitchens. The Spanish name sits loosely on top of this. Chimichanga has no settled meaning in standard Spanish, and the dictionaries of regional Mexican speech list a similar word, chivichanga, as a Tabasco term for a trinket or a trifle, which hints at a playful, throwaway nickname for a dish that was probably first served as a restaurant improvisation.

Restaurants adopted it as a house specialty and gave it local accents. Some cooks stuff in only meat and cheese, some add rice and beans, and some pour green chile sauce over the top in place of red. A machaca filling gives the dish its dried-beef chew, and a chicken filling gives it a softer one. From the Arizona dining rooms where it was first printed on menus, the chimichanga entered the wider Tex-Mex repertoire, where it now turns up in chain restaurants as a standard line, usually under a drift of melted cheese.

Origin and history

Two restaurants claim the chimichanga, and each tells the story as an accident at the fryer. In Tucson, El Charro Cafe, opened in 1922 by Monica Flin, tells of a burrito that slipped into a pan of hot fat while she was cooking; the cook began a Spanish oath and swapped it midway for the word chimichanga. The tale carries the flavor of family legend, and a Los Angeles Times account places the event in the late 1940s or early 1950s, well after the cafe opened.

The Phoenix claim belongs to Woody Johnson, who said he made the first fried burritos in 1946 as a kitchen experiment at Woody's El Nido, the restaurant that became Macayo's. A University of Arizona folklorist, Jim Griffith, remembers chimichangas being sold in Tucson's Old Pascua Yaqui village in the mid-1950s, which suggests the dish was already circulating among home cooks and small cafes by then. Researchers generally agree that Arizona produced it in the middle of the twentieth century and disagree about which table it came from.

The firmest document is a menu. By 1952, when Woody's El Nido had become Macayo's, the chimichanga stood among the restaurant's main dishes, which puts a fried burrito on a Phoenix printed menu within six years of Johnson's claimed experiment and a few years before the folklorist's Tucson memory. Macayo's has served it ever since, and the dish that began as a Phoenix specialty now fills a column on menus from Sonora to Seattle.