“In my family, we say the border crossed us,” says Trevor Baca, photographer and founder of the Mexican ingredient and supply import shop Poctli. His ancestors moved from Mexico City into Chihuahua and then farther north to New Mexico, where his grandfather was born and raised. A culinary school grad, Baca connected with his family history by traveling to Mexico and exploring the culinary landscape, where the comal is ubiquitous. “When you cook on a comal and flip the tortilla, it brings me back. It reminds me of my grandma,” Baca says. The earthenware comals that he now imports from a community in San Marcos Tlapazola, Oaxaca, called mujeres de barro rojo (“women of the red clay”) are burnished but left unglazed so the clay’s bold natural sienna color remains the star. “I wanted to see if there were other Mexican Americans like me looking to get back to their roots through this ancestral way of cooking,” he says. “When I use a comal to roast the chiles, it makes the meal taste better—because of all the love I put into it.”(Clay Comal, $75; poctli.com) —Abbey Stone
Plovnik, Ukraine
Photograph by Hugo Yu, Prop Styling by Andrea Bonin
“In Ukraine, they say bread is the head of everything,” says ceramicist Serhii Martynko, who fought on the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russia following Russia’s invasion in 2022. Though Martynko relocated to the United States following his military discharge, his pottery shop still operates from Dnipro, Ukraine. His red clay cookery channels ancient pottery used to bake sourdough in wood-fired ovens by the Trypillian people who lived in the region millennia ago. All his ceramics are both useful and deeply personal. “Working with clay is a kind of meditation,” he says, “where you sit at the potter’s wheel with your thoughts.” (Homemade Ceramic Cooking Pot, $106; clayproductsshop.com) —Noah Kaufman
