Sopa de Tortilla Is All Technique

Cooking the soup itself, on the other hand, is an exercise in restraint. Beneath that trove of garnishes is a broth made from a stunningly ordinary ingredient list—usually some combination of chicken broth and a fried puree of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and epazote.

There are no shreds of chicken, kernels of corn, or beans, as are common in many American versions of the dish. That’s because the broth is plenty complex on its own—bright and fresh yet grounded by alliums and chicken-y savor. That profile is owed to a handful of simple, thoughtful techniques that persuade each ingredient to reach its full flavor potential. 

“We like layers of flavors and textures,” Iliana de la Vega, chef of Austin’s El Naranjo and the culinary expert behind the food tour company Mexican Culinary Traditions, told me in an interview about the dish. “And that is what this soup gives you.” 

De la Vega, who grew up eating sopa de tortilla in Mexico City, explained that a traditional version of the dish is quite light, likely served as a modest lunch or as one course in a larger meal. “It is an everyday quick dish,” she said. “It’s easy, it’s delicious. It’s fulfilling.”

Cooks’ treatments for the onion, garlic, and tomato puree vary: Some simply blend them raw, while others simmer or char the tomatoes or char all three ingredients. I gave each strategy a shot, cooking the purees into a stand-in soup recipe side by side, and found that the version in which I had charred all the ingredients under my broiler was my favorite by far—it yielded a deeply complex, aromatic, and faintly smoky soup. 

In Mexican cooking, purees and sauces are often fried to concentrate their flavor, and the soup tasted diluted when I skipped this concentrating step. So I heated a tablespoon of oil in a Dutch oven and then added the puree, watching it sputter and darken as it reduced by half. “The charring accentuates all the flavors, and then the frying brings all the flavors together,” explained food writer and photographer Anita L. Arambula, who covered the dish in The San Diego Union-Tribune. “It marries it all.”

The puree reduced, I poured in the chicken broth. De la Vega explained that many Mexican cooks always have homemade chicken broth on hand from cooking chicken for tacos, enchiladas, or salads. I love the flavor of homemade broth in this soup, but a high-quality store-bought version would work too. In either case, it’s traditional to flavor the broth with a few sprigs of fresh epazote. The pungent herb’s flavor can be divisive—de la Vega likened it to a strong parsley—but it undoubtedly brings an essence that’s characteristic to the soup. Arambula likes how its bitterness rounds out the sweet acidity from the tomatoes. 

As the soup simmered, I got to work on the crispy fried tortilla strips that give the soup its name. Generally, frying tortillas is a means of repurposing them—just as you might turn days-old bread into French toast or bread pudding, you can “recycle” tortillas by turning them into enchiladas, chilaquiles, or sopa de tortilla, de la Vega explained. 

To make bite-size strips, I cut 6-inch tortillas in half before slicing them thin crosswise and frying them in just a half-inch of oil until they were golden brown and crunchy.

While I was at it, I decided to also fry thin rings of pasilla chiles, another classic garnish that provides intense bites of smoky, earthy, and fruity flavor when crumbled into the soup. The delicate rings needed only seconds to puff and darken. 

I piled a handful of tortilla strips into a serving bowl, ladled the brick-hued liquid over them, and topped the bowl with generous smatterings of the fried chiles, crema, queso fresco, avocado, and lime. When I sipped a spoonful, the broth’s charred vegetables and epazote hit me first.

Then came the substantial crunch of the tortilla strips, the jolts of pasilla smokiness, and the softened, broth-soaked cubes of cheese. Every bite was comforting, light, and totally different from the last.