I Was Introduced to This Traditional Mexican Cooking Tool on Vacation — Now Use It Every Week

This past winter, I told my family we were traveling to Mexico to escape the brutal Vermont winter, but for me, it was really all about the food. While they were excited about the pool, I was most excited for the comal cooking class at the Etéreo, Auberge Collection in Riviera Maya.

Despite years spent in professional kitchens and formal French culinary training, I arrived in Riviera Maya realizing how little I truly understood about the breadth of Mexican cuisine. My own cooking has long centered around the Chinese food I grew up eating with parents whom I’ve never seen step foot in a Mexican restaurant. In the comal cooking class, I expected to learn a few regional techniques. I didn’t expect to come away seeing so many parallels between Mexican cooking and the northern Chinese cooking that has shaped most of my career.

Our chef-instructor, Hugo Rodriguez, balanced deep technical knowledge with an easy warmth that immediately put us at ease. Before we cooked anything, he walked us through the foundations of Mexican ingredients, especially chiles.

Hugo explained how chiles bring not only heat, but flavor, aroma, sweetness, smokiness, bitterness, and texture. Different chiles are layered into everything from fresh salsas to deeply complex moles, where ingredients are toasted, charred, ground, and simmered into sauces that can take days to fully develop. It reminded me of the way dried chiles are used in Szechuan and northern Chinese cuisines — not just as spice, but as structure.

The real revelation, though, was cooking on the comal, a flat griddle traditionally used throughout Mexico and Central America for cooking tortillas, roasting chiles, toasting spices, and charring vegetables. Comals are historically made from clay, but nowadays they are often made from cast iron or carbon steel.

The comal’s wide cooking surface created distinct heat zones, allowing ingredients to blister slowly on one side while tortillas warmed gently on another. Hugo showed us how to use every inch of the cooktop. Some ingredients went directly onto the surface to char and soften; others cooked in pans set atop the comal. He taught us how to manage sticking, how to read the heat by sound and aroma, and how patience, not movement, often creates the best sear.

Standing there, flipping tortillas and charring vegetables that would eventually go into our quesadillas, I kept thinking about cooking with a wok. At their core, the techniques of wok and comal cooking felt remarkably similar. Both rely on intense heat, quick cooking, fresh ingredients, and a relationship with the cooking surface. Both demand attention (never walk away from your wok!) and reward confidence. Both transform humble ingredients through high heat and timing rather than excessive manipulation.

When I returned home, I found myself wanting to hold onto that feeling. Like anyone coming back from a memorable trip, I wanted a way to extend the experience into daily life. That’s when I found the Masienda x Made In Comal pan, a stovetop-friendly carbon steel comal designed for home kitchens.

The collaboration made immediate sense. Masienda has become one of the most respected names in heirloom Mexican ingredients, trusted by chefs and home cooks alike for its dedication to sourcing and preserving traditional foodways. Made In, meanwhile, has built a reputation for exceptionally well-crafted carbon steel cookware. According to the company, when Masienda approached them about creating a comal, they quickly recognized carbon steel as one of the best possible materials for the job: durable, capable of handling extremely high heat, and able to improve over time with use.

After cooking with it at home, I understood exactly why.

Unlike cast iron, the carbon steel comal feels noticeably lighter and more responsive, but it still develops the naturally slick, seasoned surface that makes high-heat cooking so satisfying. The pan comes preseasoned with shea nut and coconut oil, ready to use immediately, though the surface continues to evolve and deepen with every meal, much like my favorite wok from The Wok Shop. That ever-changing quality feels especially appropriate for a comal, which in many Mexican kitchens rarely leaves the stovetop. It becomes part of the rhythm of the kitchen, used for small tasks throughout the day.

Now, months later, I still find myself reaching for it constantly — sometimes for tortillas and fajitas, sometimes for baby bok choy and scallion pancakes. But that’s what I appreciated most about the class with Hugo: it broadened my understanding not just of Mexican cuisine, but of how connected cooking traditions can be across cultures. Different ingredients, different histories, different tools, but the same respect for fire, freshness, and technique.