In her southern Palm Beach County kitchen, chef Aurora García Ramos often yearns for the flavors of her native Mexico. She knows the simplest foods can pull us back to our roots.And she knows such yearning can set off treasure hunts for ingredients.

“I wanted to make good, really good, tortillas. That was the first thing I wanted to make,” she says of the gateway cooking project that led her to establish her catering business, Aurora's Mexican Kitchen. 

After more than a decade of living in south county and working as a private Spanish teacher, García Ramos returned to her native town of Tehuitzingo in Puebla state for a few years so her daughter could complete her studies there. It was when she returned to Palm Beach County in 2017 that the yearning for authentic Mexican food stuck particularly hard.

In Tehuitzingo, she had spent time with her grandmother and cooking icon, Amparo Martínez, before she died. García Ramos was able to reconnect with the childhood lessons she learned in her grandmother’s kitchen: how to grind alkalized corn on a metate mealing stone, how to muddle spices in a molcajete, how to create the most complex of moles and how to incorporate them into the simplest of tamales without overpowering the masa’s delicate earthiness.     

“My grandmother was very strict. She didn’t like shortcuts. So we really learned about good food: mole from scratch, chocolate from scratch, bread from scratch,” says García Ramos, who graduated from culinary school in Puebla and later studied under the late Yuri de Gortari, the nationally acclaimed chef, professor and researcher of traditional Mexican cuisine.

Back in South Florida, she searched for purveyors of the kind of heirloom corn kernels that might replicate the texture and aroma of the tortillas back home. She found them online and treated them with a slaked lime solution to “nixtamalize” them as they do in Mexico to make the corn more grindable, flavorful and digestible. 

She used her late grandmother’s old granite metate to grind the corn into a masa that she would shape into thickish discs and cook on a flat comal pan over flames to produce pliable and utterly delicious tortillas. 

“I always tell people this: If you have good bread, you can make any kind of sandwich. If you want a good taco, you start with a perfect tortilla,” she says.  

Each step of the process brought her closer to the warmth of Puebla state and the full landscape of her identity. Puebla, where the abundance of clay yields world-coveted Talavera pottery, is where García Ramos understood the depth of Mexico’s complexities -- and her own -- first-hand, via food. 

“Just to give you an idea how rich and complex regional Mexican food is: My mother was from the north of the state. My father is from the south. Their traditional mole Poblano recipes are totally different. The northern version is a bit more bitter, with less chocolate and more chiles. I make the southern version,” García Ramos told me when I visited her catering kitchen, a sunny vintage space punctuated with clay pots and dishes from Puebla.

Her tortilla-making journey led her to another project -- making authentic tamales.   

“It turns out that more people wanted to buy tamales than tortillas,” says García Ramos, who sells as many as 200 handmade tamales on a weekend, especially during the Christmas season. Her top sellers: her mole chicken tamales and her vegan tamales. “People tell me that when they eat one of my tamales, they remember their grandmother. They remember their mom. They tell me stories.” 

The tortillas, tamales and moles she sells at her Delray Beach GreenMarket stand represent more than weekend curiosities. The treasure hunts that led to her culinary career also led her to a powerful sense of being whole. Fully here and fully in Mexico.

Even when she traveled to Tuscany for a week of cooking classes at a local culinary school, García Ramos’ thoughts turned to Mexico when she returned to South Florida. She started hosting cooking parties at home to teach locals about Mexican food.

This is her true calling, says the former teacher. She hopes to fashion her catering kitchen into a space for learning about and savoring the nuances of Mexican cooking. There’s plenty of room for culinary classes and exploratory dinner events. And there’s plenty to be inspired by, each corner here echoing Puebla. 

This setting of earthy clay pots and wooden furniture feels more like García Ramos’ artist studio than a commissary kitchen. It is where she can achieve the deepest chocolate shades of a proper mole Poblano, a sauce to be ladled over broth-poached turkey and lavished with a shower of sesame seeds.

It’s where she creates her green market tortillas and tamales, whips up a bright rainbow of aguas frescas, crafts vanilla-scented flan and remembers her grandmother.

In a blink, Mexico is restored in her soul.

Editor's note: A more extensive version of this story was published on Oct. 22, 2021.