Mole Poblano

What to expect

Taste

There is more happening here than in anything else in this collection, and no single flavour dominates. Bitter comes first and last — from the chillies, the chocolate, the toasted seeds and the charred vegetables — and it is the spine of the sauce. Around it there is sweetness from raisins, from the ancho and mulato chillies, which are genuinely sweet and fruity, and from the tiny amount of sugar if it is needed. There is a deep toasted nuttiness from the almonds, sesame and pumpkin seeds. There is warm spice: cinnamon, clove and aniseed, all present and none of them dominant. Tomatillo brings acidity. The heat is moderate and comes late — these are not fiercely hot chillies and mole is not a hot dish. And chocolate, which most people cannot identify blind and which is doing exactly what it is supposed to: adding bitterness, body and a faint fruitiness, not sweetness. The result is a sauce with a long, layered, slightly bitter finish and no single note you could name.

Aroma

The toasting stage is the best-smelling hour in this collection and it changes every few minutes as each thing goes on the pan — chillies first, which smell nutty and faintly like tobacco; then almonds; then sesame; then charring vegetables; then the whole spices, which fill the room. The finished sauce smells dark and sweet and spiced, more like a Christmas cake than like anything savoury, which is a fair warning that it is not a normal sauce.

Texture

Completely smooth and quite thick, with a slightly velvety, almost fatty mouthfeel that comes from the ground nuts and seeds. Two sievings are what produce it. Underneath, poached chicken is soft. There is no crunch anywhere except the sesame seeds on top and whatever the tortillas provide, which is why both are there.

Sound

The toasting is the audible part — chillies crackling for a few seconds each, seeds popping in a dry pan. Then the frying stage, which is genuinely violent: a wet purée hitting hot lard spits loudly for the first minute and then settles into a thick slow bubbling. The long simmer is nearly silent and needs stirring rather than listening.

How the flavour moves

Bitterness and toasted nut first. Then sweetness from the fruit and the chillies, arriving as a wave and lifting it. Spice through the middle — cinnamon and clove particularly. Then the heat, which builds slowly and is never fierce. The finish is very long and predominantly bitter, and it is the most complicated aftertaste of anything on this site. Across a plate it becomes progressively richer and the heat accumulates.

Serve it

Hot, poured over warm chicken. It holds heat very well because of its density.

Goes with

Plain rice, warm corn tortillas, and nothing else complicated. A dark Mexican beer, or a rich red with low tannin — tannin fights the bitterness badly. Where it fails is next to anything else complex, which is a real risk: mole is a sauce that needs a plain plate around it, and the traditional accompaniments are plain for exactly that reason.

Cook's notes

Difficulty

Not difficult and genuinely demanding. Every individual step is easy; there are about fifteen of them, the toasting stage requires constant attention because a scorched chilli ruins the batch, and it is three hours of standing in a kitchen. It is a project rather than a dinner.

Cost

Moderate for what it is. The chillies, nuts and seeds add up, and it feeds eight generously with sauce left over.

Equipment

A blender that can genuinely purée nuts and chilli skins. A fine sieve, and the sieving is not optional — it is what makes a mole velvety rather than gritty. A heavy pot. A dry pan for toasting.

When to make it

Celebrations, weekends, and cold weather. It is not a weeknight dish under any circumstances.

Best season

None.

You know it is done when

The chilli purée darkens visibly as it fries — from bright red-brown to something much deeper. The finished mole should be very dark brown, almost black, glossy, and thick enough to coat a spoon heavily and hold a channel when a finger is drawn through it.

And it feels like

Completely smooth. Any grittiness means the sieving was skipped or hurried, and it is the difference between a mole and a paste.

Food safety

Nothing unusual. The frying stage spits a great deal and deserves a long-handled spoon and some distance.

Where it goes wrong

Scorching the chillies, which is the fault — a few seconds too long and the whole batch is bitter beyond rescue. Skipping the sieving, which leaves a gritty sauce. Skipping the frying stage and simply simmering the purées, which gives a thin, raw, muddy result. Adding the chocolate early, where it can scorch on the base. Treating the sugar as an ingredient rather than a correction. And expecting it to taste of chocolate, which it does not.

If it does go wrong

Bitter beyond enjoyment: the chillies burnt, and there is no fix. Thin: simmer longer, uncovered. Gritty: sieve it again, which works. Too sharp: a teaspoon of sugar at a time and more salt. Flat: it probably was not fried long enough at the sazonar stage, and another ten minutes of hard frying before more stock goes in will help. Too sweet: more chilli purée if you have any, or more salt.

Making it ahead

Essential, and traditional. The sauce is better after a day or two and freezes perfectly. Make it once, freeze it in portions, and it becomes a twenty-minute dinner for months.

Keeping it

A week in the fridge and it improves for several days. This is a sauce that is made ahead as a matter of course.

Reheating

Very well, with a splash of stock to loosen. It thickens considerably on standing.

Freezing

Three months and it survives perfectly. Freeze it in portions — the sauce is the work, and having it in a freezer turns a three-hour dish into a twenty-minute one.

Leftovers

Enormously useful. Over eggs, in enchiladas, with roast vegetables, or as the base of a stew. In Mexico leftover mole becomes enmoladas the next day.

Scaling it

Doubles well and is worth doing, since the labour is almost identical. The blending is the only constraint.

Substitutions

The three chillies are doing three different jobs and substituting freely will change the sauce. Ancho is the dried poblano: sweet, raisiny, mild. Pasilla is dried chilaca: darker, more herbal, faintly like tobacco and cocoa. Mulato is a variant of the poblano dried differently: smokier and sweeter still. Between them they build the depth; using one kind three times over makes something flatter. Mexican chocolate is coarse, gritty with sugar and usually flavoured with cinnamon — a very dark plain chocolate plus a little extra cinnamon is a reasonable stand-in. Lard is traditional and oil works.

Dietary swaps

Not vegetarian as written because of the chicken stock and the lard, both of which can be replaced — the sauce itself is entirely plant-based and a vegetable-stock version poured over roast squash or fried tofu is very good. Contains nuts, sesame and cereals containing gluten, all declared. Not gluten-free because of the bread; a corn tortilla alone can do that job.

Shopping for it

Ancho, pasilla and mulato chillies, whole and dried, and it is worth getting all three. Mexican chocolate if you can find it. Fresh whole spices. Tomatillos, tinned if fresh are unavailable.

Keeping the cost down

Buy the dried chillies by the bag from a Latin American grocer, where they cost a fraction of the supermarket price and keep for a year. Chicken thighs and drumsticks are cheaper than breast and much better here. Make a double batch and freeze half — the labour is the cost of this dish, not the ingredients.

Sustainability

The chillies and spices travel well and keep for a year. The chicken is the main impact and using thighs rather than breast is a better use of the bird.

Nutrition

Around 680 calories a serving with chicken. The sauce is nut- and seed-heavy, so a substantial amount of the fat is unsaturated, and there is real protein in it before the chicken is counted. It is a rich dish and it is not an unhealthy one.

Worth it?

Worth it once, and worth freezing so that the once lasts. This is the most ambitious thing on the site and the most rewarding: three hours produces something with a depth nothing else here comes close to, and there is no shortcut that gets you within reach of it. Make double, freeze half, and do not let the chillies burn.

Where it comes from

Origin

Puebla, in central Mexico.

Also called

Mole poblano. Mole alone names a whole family of sauces, of which this is the most famous.

Said out loud

MOH-leh po-BLAH-no. Two syllables in mole, and the second one matters.

What the name means

From the Nahuatl mulli, meaning sauce. That root is more familiar than it looks: guacamole is ahuacamulli, avocado sauce. So mole simply means sauce, and mole poblano means the sauce of Puebla.

History

The convent story is the one everybody tells: Sor Andrea de la Asunción at Santa Rosa in Puebla, improvising a sauce for a visiting archbishop or viceroy in the seventeenth century, grinding together whatever the kitchen held. It is a good story, it is repeated in almost every account, and there is no contemporary evidence for it. What the ingredients themselves record is more reliable and more interesting. The chillies, tomatoes, tomatillos, turkey, chocolate and pumpkin seeds are all indigenous to the Americas, and complex ground chilli-and-seed sauces are documented in Mesoamerican cooking before European contact. The almonds, cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, sesame and bread are all Old World. Mole poblano is therefore not an invention so much as a document of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the convent story — nuns combining Spanish and indigenous pantries — is a fair metaphor even if it is not a fact.

Why it matters

It is the dish of celebrations: weddings, baptisms, Day of the Dead, and Independence Day. Traditionally it is made with turkey rather than chicken, which is itself a native American bird. Making it is a communal activity in many households because of the labour involved, and a family's mole recipe is a genuine inheritance.

When it is eaten

Celebrations, always. Nobody makes mole on a Tuesday.

The traditional way

Two things. The frying of the purées in hot fat before any liquid goes in — sazonar, seasoning the sauce — which darkens and deepens it and is the step that separates a real mole from a blended soup. And grinding on a metate, a stone, which produced a texture a blender approximates and does not equal, which is why the sieving matters so much in a domestic version.

How it changed

Chicken has largely replaced turkey outside celebrations. Commercial mole pastes are now widely sold in Mexico and widely used, including by good cooks — a jar of paste loosened with stock is a respectable weeknight version and nobody pretends it is the same thing.

Regional variations

Oaxaca is said to have seven moles — negro, rojo, coloradito, amarillo, verde, chichilo and manchamanteles — and they differ enormously, from a bright herbal green to a nearly black one. Mole poblano is the Puebla version and the most internationally known. Mole verde uses fresh herbs and tomatillos and takes an hour rather than three.

How this version differs

It is a fairly orthodox poblano build using chicken rather than turkey. The ingredient list is shorter than some traditional versions, which can run to thirty or more components; the ones here are the load-bearing ones.

Sources and credit

The convent legend is given as a legend. The pre-Columbian and Old World components are the standard account.

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