Leftover turkey, Mexican style: enchiladas (with La Costeña Doña Chonita mole)

So a couple weeks ago it was Thanksgiving, and since I'm American I basically force my Scottish family to eat a big-ass traditional turkey dinner with me, even though we're going to have another one in less than a month.

(To be fair, I've never heard anyone in Scotland complain about getting two turkey dinners a year.)

But what do you do with your leftovers when you're also MexiGeek?

Well, for me, leftover turkey means only one thing: enmoladas!

Most Americans have heard of enchiladas. Even a fair few Brits have heard the word, though I have yet to see a proper enchilada served in the UK.

Well, "enchilada" means "(tortilla) smothered in chile sauce". But in Mexico you can smother a filled tortilla in anything.

If you smother it in bean sauce it's an enfrijolada. If you smother it in tomato sauce it's an entomatada. And if you smother it in mole it's an enmolada.

Of course, the purpose of a leftover dish is too be quick and easy. It should be pieced together with stuff you already have lying around.

In Mexico, you would always have tortillas to use up (enchiladas and their variations are usually made with stale tortillas briefly fried to "revive" them), and if it's the day after a holiday, there's a good chance you have some mole in the fridge as well.

This ain't necessarily the case outside Mexico.

One of the things I never shit like shut up about is how I made my own mole poblano one year. And I definitely did use the leftovers to make enmoladas.

But this year I had a little help from my friends at La Costeña, who sent me loads of awesome products from their Doña Chonita range, including mole poblano.

La Costeña is a well-known brand of Mexican food and ingredients. Unlike some brands, they are actually a Mexican company, and their core costumer base comprises Mexicans cooking in Mexico.

However, they have been expanding their international market, which is a great windfall for all of us, because of the high quality and authenticity of their products.

Two things from La Costeña I find indispensable throughout the year are their tinned tomatillos (essential when fresh ones are out of season) and their chipotles en adobo (my favourite brand; I cook with these a lot).

Their Doña Chonita range are ready-to-serve salsas, moles, etc, that you can just pour into a saucepan, heat up, and use.

So this mole, a leftover pack of tortillas and some shredded Thanksgiving turkey made for about the quickest enmoladas ever.

Seriously, this was the first time I ever plated up a Mexican dish less than 30 minutes after starting the prep.

I put the oven on to 160° C fan, then opened the mole and began heating it over medium.

You want it warm, but don't burn this beautiful sauce. Keep an eye on it and stir frequently.

Then I shredded the turkey by hand and fried it in about 10 g of butter and a tablespoon of olive oil.

When the turkey read warm through I added just enough mole to the pan to coat the turkey completely.

Then I filled some tortillas with the turkey, rolled them up, put them in an oven-safe dish and covered with the rest of the mole.

Ten minutes in the oven and they were done. I topped them with crumbled queso fresco from Gringa Dairy before serving.

This is gringo-style cooking, but delicious none the less. (In Mexico you would fry corn tortillas, then dip them in mole before folding them around the turkey.)

The mole, which after all was the star of the dish, was excellent. It had a real depth of flavour that you could only really top by spending four days making your own from scratch.

A lot of non-Mexicans are unsure about mole because it famously contains chocolate (as well as 23 or more other ingredients).

Of course, mole looks like chocolate sauce because of its rich brown colour, but this mole doesn't taste overpoweringly of chocolate because it has such a good balance of its many ingredients. 

It also has a noticeable chile zing, which is important because the real stars of mole are the Holy Trinity of Chiles: anchos, mulatos, and pasillas.

I'm always an advocate of making your own mole, if you have four days and 23 ingredients handy, but most of us don't, besides which it's a good idea to try products like these so you can get an idea of what mole is supposed to taste like.

Anyway, although I made this after Thanksgiving, Christmas is coming up, and I reckon we're all getting pretty tired of turkey curry. Trust me, there's no substitute for turkey enmoladas. 

Tamal.co.uk: This is what tamales are meant to taste like

Note the expert wrapping.

If there are two universal truths about tamales, they are:

1) tamales are delicious

2) tamales take forever to make

(The third truth is that the singular of tamales is tamal.)

In Mexico, when tamales are on the menu, the whole family comes together to make an assembly-line and share the workload.

But what do you do in Britain, when you really want tamales but don't have the time to make them yourself (or an army of expert helpers)?

Order them from Tamal.co.uk!

Unlike some companies who import ready-made tamales from Mexico (which is a lot of food miles for a finished dish), Tamal.co.uk make their tamales freshly to order, right here in Britain.

I was very keen to try them because I'm a firm believer in tamales as one of the great dishes of Mexican cuisine.

They have topped my list of favourite foods since I was a kid, and as they're still relatively unknown in fajita-ruled Britannia, I believe they can turn a lot of people around about Mexican food.

However, they are not easy to make, and they demand specialist ingredients like masa harina and corn husks (to say nothing of the fillings).

So Tamal.co.uk is important to me in my quest to get everyone eating tamales. Because, honestly, we can't all make our own.

For our test-drive, we ordered a selection of savoury tamales:

Pork in red chile sauce (for me, the classic filling)

Chicken in salsa verde (another favourite)

Chicken in mole poblano (a decadent choice!)

Rajas con queso (green chile strips and cheese)

And for dessert we got two strawberry tamales. Because sweet tamales are awesome!

The tamales can be steamed from frozen but I defrosted mine in the fridge overnight.

(There are also microwaving instructions if you don't have a steamer.)

The tamales themselves were expertly wrapped in their corn husks and absolutely perfect in texture and flavour.

The fillings were uniformly delicious. Of particular note for me were the pork in red chile sauce, which really brought back memories, and the chicken in mole (as soon as they started cooking, my kitchen was filled with the lovely, complex aroma of mole).

The runaway star, though, was the tamal de rajas con queso.

I love rajas anyway, but the cheese was amazing (either real queso de Oaxaca or a very close substitute, and there was a delicious (and quite spicy) tomato and chile sauce.

Then we tried the strawberry tamales.

Oh.

My.

God.

Anyone who doesn't try these is doing themselves a major disservice.

I've written about making tamales a couple times before, but for anyone who finds the workload a bit daunting or who just isn't sure what tamales are meant to taste like (not having grown up eating them), Tamal.co.uk. is the option for you.

This is exactly what tamales are meant to taste like.

Tamales all look alike, so they arrive with handy labels.

Christmas Dinner (la cena navideña): in defense of turkey

I hadn't planned on doing another new post until 2013, but I was inspired to write this after watching River Cottage Christmas Fayre, starring Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

(I see he used ye olde Englishe spelling, despite knowing nothing about Old English. And fayre would be Middle English anyway.)

My beef is with how Hugh and his army of effeminate Aga-loving country fudruckers decry the Christmas turkey as "an American intruder".

Yes, turkey is "American", but not in the sense of "United States" (by which Hugh means "How dare another country have people in it who are wealthier than I am? A pox on them!").

Turkey is "North American" food, and it's an important part of Mexican cuisine.

Chicken is the most commonly eaten bird in modern Mexico, but it was introduced by the Spanish.

When the Spanish first arrived, they found turkey was the long-established culinary bird of choice.

Today it features in Mexico's national dish, guajalote en mole (turkey in mole sauce), which will be eaten in Christmas dinners throughout the republic.

In fact, as the Spanish conquest of Mexico comes about 100 years before the landing at Plymouth Rock, we might say turkey is first and foremost Mexican food.

Of course, our Christmas-style roasting has nothing to do with Mexico. In fact, the Castilian Spanish word for "roast" (asar) means something very different in the Mexican kitchen.

But the fact remains that when you eat turkey, you are partaking of Mexico's long and infinitely varied culinary history.

That's why turkey will always have a place on my Christmas table.

¡Feliz navidad!

Mole Poblano 4: verdict and meaning revisited

[First published 18 February 2012]

The last instalment in my mole poblano series is something of an anticlimax in that, once the sauce is made, there isn't that much work left to do.

What had been worrying me (besides the flavour) was how I was going to make the dish look nice.

It's difficult to make a big lake of brown sauce look beautiful.

To add to the trouble, I'm not really much of an artist. I love being served beautiful plates of food in restaurants, but I'm not sure it's my calling to design them.

So I basically ripped off the common technique of resting the dish's main component on a neat round pillar of accompanying rice, with extra sauce around the edge.

Choosing the rice was tricky.

 I wanted something with colour, to relieve the brown of the mole. But the recipe I usually use for arroz verde has tomatillos, which are very tart, and would probably clash with the dark, rich sauce.

Luckily I found an alternative version of arroz verde in Thomasina Miers's Mexican Food Made Simple. She excludes tomatillos, cuts down on the coriander, and ups the quantities of common green leaves and herbs like spinach and parsley.

This is most likely because her book is written for British cooks, and she is mindful of what ingredients are available in the UK.

Tomatillos are especially hard to get here, though, as expected, Lupe Pinto's sells them tinned, and you can even order fresh ones from The Cool Chile Company when they're in season. The website currently promises them in July 2012, and I will definitely be ordering some for fresh salsa verde.

By the way, the basic recipe for any arroz verde is:

1) blitz whatever green leaves and herbs you're using together with some green chiles

2) sweat some finely chopped onion in an oven-proof pot over medium heat

3) add plain white rice to the pot and fry for a few minutes, until all the grains are coated in oil

4) add minced garlic to the pot and fry for a minute or two longer (you want the garlic to get lightly brown, but don't let it burn)

5) add the pureed greens to the pot and fry for a minute

6) add stock (about twice the volume of rice) and bring to the boil

7) either turn the heat down and simmer for a half hour or cover and place in a 150°-170° C oven for a half hour

Anyway, the other thing I wanted was a salad of some kind.

The Romans apparently invented salad, and it's really a European thing.

In Mexican dining, vegetables are included in the main dish, or there is a separate vegetable course. But because American dining is largely based on European dining, I feel compelled to have an accompanying salad.

My original plan was to use the sweet corn salad from Thomasina Miers' book. It's delicious. But then I discovered an even better idea from an unlikely source: Jamie Oliver.

One of the books my wife uses is Jamie's 30-Minute Meals. Though we never really get the food cooked and served within a half hour, the recipes are amazing. I know people have mixed views about Saint Jamie, but you have to admit he's got it in the flavour department. I'd take him over that twat Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall any day.

The salad is meant to have an Indian feel to it, and consists of shredded courgette (zucchini) and carrot, in a dressing of plain yogurt, fresh red chiles (yay!), and red wine vinegar.

As I was eating this bomb-ass salad, it ocurred to me that with minor alterations, this salad could be completely Mexican.

Courgette is native to Mexixo (where it is called calabacita). And though carrots originally come from the Middle East, they are a popular vegetable in Mexico. Check your jar of pickled jalapenos if you don't believe me.

In fact, in 2010 Mexico produced over 346,000 tonnes of carrots.

The alterations I made were swapping the yogurt for sour cream (okay, technically sour cream isn't Mexican either, but it is the closest thing I'm likely to get to crema espesa, unless I make my own, which I'm scared to do), and the red wine vinegar for lime juice.

Now, after the epic journey to make the sauce over the preceding four days, today's work was relatively minimal.

First, I took the mole sauce out of the fridge and put it in a pot on the hob over a medium heat, stirring occaisonally. 

In a separate pan I melted some butter. Mexicans cook with lard, but I don't, and my wife also expressed interest in frying the turkey breast in butter before adding it to the sauce.

So when the butter was melted and beginning to foam, I put in the turkey breast left over from Christmas and browned in on all sides. Then I put it into the mole and left it to simmer.

Next I did the rice as described above and shredded the carrot and courgette.

I had never eaten raw courgette before I tried this salad, but trust me, it's delicious.

I also whipped up the salad dressing, but kept it separate until it was time to serve. It's not very acidic, but I didn't want to risk the lime juice (and chile acid -- see my post on cebollas en escabeche) cooking the veggies and making the salad go soggy.

When the rice was done it was time to serve. The salad went on side plates, and I spooned the dressing on at the very last minute.

I created a restaurant-style column of rice by using an ordinary cookie-cutter. I was very pleased that the rice held its shape after I gingerly pulled the cookie-cutter away.

Using tongs, I painstakingly placed slices of turky breast on the rice, spooned over a bit more sauce, and then made a ring of sauce around the edge of the plates.

Because my efforts weren't as neat as I had hoped, here's an airbrushed version of the final result:

Yes I cooked this. I also edited it using Photoshop.

So how did it taste?

I've had mole a few times before.

There was the mediocre mole with chicken I had in a Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh.

Also I have been given jars of mole paste on two separate occasions: once it was La Preferida, and once La Costeña. Both are respectable brands, the latter being an actual Mexican company while the former was founded in Chicago by Hispanic Americans.

Fortunately my homemade mole tasted more like the jarred versions than the bad restaurant one. Which is not to say I hadn't been worried.

There is so much preparation involved in this recipe, but once you get to the long simmering stage, there's not much more you can do to add or improve flavour, beyond a bit of seasoning.

I tasted the sauce several times as it simmered.

First it needed salt, because I'd used homemade stock instead of a salty stock cube.

Then I was concerned it didn't have enough rich "darkness", so I added 25 grammes more of the chocolate.

But the chocolate had sugar in it, so now it was too sweet. I added a bit more salt and a bit of the chile water.

It still didn't taste quite right, but I was now afraid to tweak it further.

Besides, the flavours apparently needed time to mingle, so I went upstairs for a shower. When I came back, I found the promised layer of fat that meant the mole was cooked.

I skimmed off the fat and tasted it again. Still not quite there, but moving in the right direction.

I cooled it and let it "mature" in the fridge overnight.

However, when I finally dug into the finished dish, I was pleasantly surprised. It tasted like mole. I had actually made mole!.

Nevertheless, if I ever make this again - and that's a pretty big if - there are a few thing I will do differently.

Firstly, I still think it was a bit too sweet, so I'll forget the brioche and substitute a stale slice of baguette.

Also, it was a bit too chocolatey in that commercial milk-chocolate way, so in the absence of solid Mexican cooking chocolate, I would use high coco-solid European cooking chocolate, for a bitter, rich base note.

Also, as a time-saver I might use more of the chile water in place of stock. It's much easier to make, and would probably make the flavour darker and spicier as well.

Overall the mole was a great sucess, though the big hit of the evening was actually the green rice.

My wife even had seconds, which she never does with rice (except for risotto, which should give you an idea of how tasty the rice actually was).

So well done, Thomasina. No wonder you won MasterChef.

This was quite an undertaking, and certainly the most ambitious thing I've attempted in the kitchen to date.

But there are actually seven types of mole in Mexican cuisine. And I intend to cook them all.

Mole poblano 3: the making of mole

[First published on 2 February 2012]

I have been dreading writing this post, just as I was dreading the actual cooking.

You see, after the recipes are read and the ingredients assembled, there is nothing left but to take that plunge and start cooking the most time-consuming and ambitious dish I have ever attempted.

In his book, Authentic Mexican, Rick Bayless writes that it takes about six hours to make mole if the broth (or stock) is on hand.

It takes a good two or three hours at least to make a good stock; but even if the stock is made, six hours of cooking is not feasible if you're planning on enjoying the meal that night.

Also, all the recipes for mole say it tastes better the second day (and even better the third, and so on), so they all recommend making it at least over two days and letting the flavours mingle.

This is how I made mole:

When we got our turkey from Craigies Farm before Christmas, I put the neck and giblets in the freezer. I also saved the carrot trimmings from the carrot and star anise soup. And of course I saved the leg bones and carcass after the turkey was carved up.

All of this went into the freezer, along with some choice cuts of breast for the finished dish.

On day one I took out my defrosted turkey bones, neck, and giblets, and put them in a large pot with the carrot trimmings, a couple bay leaves, Mexican oregano, epazote, and lots and lots of water. I brought it to the boil and then let it simmer for a few hours.

When the stock was ready (when it tasted very strongly of turkey), I let put cool, then strained the broth and put it in the fridge. The broth was now "on hand".

The next day, my wife and I prepped the chiles by cutting off the stems, tearing the chiles into flat pieces, and discarding the seeds and veins - apart from the tablespoon of ancho chile seeds called for in the sauce. We placed these in a ziploc bag.

The day after that, it was my turn to get up with the baby. I changed her nappy, took her downstairs, and got her some breakfast.

Then she watched me toast each kind of seed and spice in a dry pan and put them into the huge pestle and mortar or "molcajete" I got for Christmas.

"Molcajete" is Mexican Spanish and literally means "sauce pot", grinding being an essential technique in making Mexican sauces.

You have to toast the seeds and spices one kind at a time, because they all have different cooking times. If you try to do them all at once, you WILL burn some of them. And, as I mentioned in my last post, the actual grinding is very hard.

This was the part where my daughter stopped watching me and went off to play with her toys. I would have been happy to join her.

Eventually I did finish the grinding, though. Below is a photo of the fruits of my labour.

By this time my wife had come downstairs and took the bairn off to get dressed etc, which was just as well because it was chile time.

I heated up some oil in a frying pan and began frying the chile pieces briefly on each side into they changed colour. This took forever. While it is true that frying one or two chiles this way is no big deal, there is a lot of chile in this dish. I easily spent half an hour or more just frying these chiles.

Once they were finally fried, I put them all in a ceramic bowl, covered them with boiling water, weighted them down with a plate, and left them to soak.

They needed at least twenty minutes, so it was time to get on with the other frying. But first, I needed a roast tomato, a roasted onion, and three cloves of roasted garlic.

To achieve this, I took the wire rack out of the grill pan, lined the pan with foil, and set the tomato, onion, and garlic under the grill.

My intention was to keep an eye on them while frying the other ingredients, as the tomato needed 12 minutes, the garlic barely five, and the onion (probably) somewhere in between.

This was a stupid idea, and of course the time got away from me, so though the tomato turned out fine and the onion just needed the blackened outer layer removed, the garlic was a write-off.

Instead, I used three fresh cloves of garlic, finely minced (on my new garlic grinder I also got for Christmas - thanks Santa!).

I chopped up the onion (roughly, as it gets blitzed anyway), and mashed up the tomato in my molcajete. I then put all this in a bowl with 50 grammes of Mexican drinking chocolate (Diane Kennedy's suggestion).

While all this was happening I was also:

Heating oil in a pan (the same pan in which I fried the chiles, as directed by the recipes)

Frying the pumpkin seeds, almonds, pecan nuts, raisins, brioche crumbs, tortilla pieces, and possibly a few other things I'm forgetting, one kind at a time

Adding each to the molcajete, as soon as it was available

When I dropped the raisins into the hot oil they puffed up and turned golden within a few seconds. At that point I removed them with a slotted spoon and put them into the molcajete. Once they had cooled they turned normal again.

I mention that because it was awesome. 

By the way, you remove everything from the pan with a slotted spoon, in order to preserve as much oil as possible.

All this stuff ends up in the molcajete for some more difficult grinding, and from thence into the bowl with the tomato, onion, garlic, and chocolate.

In Spanish, the verb moler means "to grind" (it's related to the English word "mill" and the French moulin).

Grinding being so vital to Mexican sauces, it's only natural that the Spanish thought "mole" when they heard the Aztec word molli. But alas the two are, as we say in linguistics, faux amis.

By now the chiles had had more than enough time to soak.

I drained the water into a separate bowl (one recipe recommended keeping it) and blitzed the chiles with a hand blender, adding some of the chile-soaking water (which was now a lovely rust colour and very fragrant) to help the chiles pass through the blades. The goal is a thick paste, so only add the water a bit at a time.

Once I had the chile paste, it was time to blitz everything else.

So, again with the hand blender, I blitzed the mixture of fried and toasted nuts, seeds, spices, bread and tortilla crumbs, chocolate, roasted tomato and onion, and minced garlic.

For this paste, I used the turkey stock (again, a little at a time) to keep the mixture running smoothly through the blades. The chile paste was black, but this paste was a kind of mushy beige.

I had started this thing at about 7.30, after my daughter and I had breakfast (she woke up early that morning, and I didn't try to get her back to sleep because I had so much to do). It was now after noon.

For the next step I needed two frying pans (or actually one pan and one pot).

First, I had to fry the chile paste in the big pot for a few minutes until it thickened and got darker (though it was already pretty dark).

Then I turned the heat right down and, in the original frying pan, fried the other paste for a few minutes until it too had thickened and darkened.

Then I added that paste to the chile paste in the pot, turned the heat up to medium, and added most of the remaining stock, mixing the whole concoction into a huge pot of bubbling sauce.

I then left it to simmer for a couple hours, occasionally tasting it for salt, sweetness, chocolate, and general balance of flavours.

The mole is cooked when a layer of fat rises to the surface. You then skim off this fat and transfer the whole thing to a covered dish.

Once it cools, put it in the fridge overnight ( you can keep it there for a week, apparently, and it will only improve in flavour).

I found the hoped-for layer of fat when I came back downstairs after having lunch, a shower, and helping to put a child's bed together. It was nearly 4pm.

My last picture for this post is of the mole cooking in the pot. It looks like chocolate sauce, but it isn't. Next week we'll get into what I did with the sauce the next day.

Mole poblano 2: ingredientes

[First published on 22 January 2012]

So if the legend of the invention of mole is true, what did Sor Andrea choose from the larder of five continents?

There is no reliable surviving record of exactly which ingredients she used and in what quantities. I have recipes for mole in for several cookbooks and find no agreement of a definitive ingredients list.
There are some things which are guaranteed to be in mole, many others which are very likely to be, and a few things which can be in mole, but aren't always.

As I wrote Chapter 1, the ingredients of mole reflect the extent of Spanish power and influence in the 16th century, especially the unique riches of the newly-discovered Americas. I will list the ingredients of the mole I made, arranged by place of origin.

The Americas

1 tomato

This red fruit, which is usually eaten as a vegetable, is indispensable to European, especially Mediterranean, cuisine. But tomatoes come from the Americas. They are native to South America and were imported into central and North America by the Aztecs. The Spanish discovered it there and spread it throughout the world. Even Indian cuisine has embraced it in dishes like rogan josh.

1 corn tortilla (stale)

With the possible exception of chiles, this has got to be the most typical Mexican food. Aztecs and other native peoples of pre-Colombian central and South America had been cultivating corn for literally millennia.

Corn was a dietary staple of many Northern Native American tribes as well, but it was the central and South Americans who discovered that by washing corn in slaked lime they could break down the outer husk and make it easier to digest.

This transformed corn into a highly nutritious super-food (rather than something that would pass through your digestive system relatively unchanged, and destroy your teeth in the process).

Corn tortillas became the fuel of the Aztec Empire and citizens could count on a daily ration of them. In mole, one stale tortilla is used to thicken the sauce

Pumpkin seeds

This is an optional ingredient, and one more typical of pipián, the green mole. But rest assured it is 100% native to the Americas.

In fact, archaeological evidence suggests the first cultivators of pumpkins were really after the seeds. If you've ever eaten toasted pumpkinseeds, you'll see why.

Mole is a seed-thickened sauce, and the main seed is actually sesame, but I used about 60 grammes of pumpkin seeds because I love them, and to maximize the prehispanic ingredients.

Herbs
 
epazote - This is considered a weed in the US but is a much-valued and delicious herb in Mexican cooking.

Not only is it indigenous to North America, it doesn't seem to grow anywhere else at all, so I can only get it in dried form here in the UK.

Mexican oregano - This herb is similar to common oregano, but not actually related to it. Its scientific name is Lippia graveolens; "graveolens" means "heavy scent", because it smells like a much more potent version of European oregano.

These two herbs were a revelation to me and have totally changed how I perceive the flavour of Mexican food. Technically they are used in the turkey stock which is used to make the mole, rather than the mole proper.

Allspice

But even more than the herbs, this dried berry has changed my view of Mexican food.

The name allspice was coined by the English in the seventeenth-century because thought it tasted like a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. And so it does, which is lucky, as those other spices come from Asia.

This little berry, however, was born and bred in central America. It's presence in the mole is welcome, but it must be pure showing off, as cinnamon and clove are also used, so presumably the allspice is redundant.

Turkey

Chef and cultural anthropologist Rick Bayless poses the question of whether "mole" refers only to the sauce or also to what's in it.

Non-Mexicans probably assume the former (which would be in line with European cuisine and its derivatives), but Bayless writes that Mexicans do not perceive the sauce and the meat as being separable.

Whenever I have seen mole on restaurant menus, chicken has always been the meat, but the traditional choice is definitely turkey.

Chicken was introduced to Mexico by the Spanish (and Mexico immediately embraced it), but Mexico had long been domesticating turkeys for consumption, as well as hunting wild ones.

Chocolate

More than chiles, more than turkey, more than tomatoes (and more than even vanilla, which also comes from Mexico), chocolate is probably Mexico's greatest culinary gift.

Before Columbus landed, this was nature's best kept secret, and afterwards became the world's most highly praised culinary discovery. Everyone loves chocolate.

But most people don't put it with meat. Chocolate is the blessing and curse of the mole, because nearly all non-Mexicans who have heard of mole say "Chocolate chicken? Gross!". But there are three things to consider:

1) If the mole is to be a celebration of the riches of the new Spanish Empire, it must include the most valualbe thing in it (besides gold, which is edible, but not very tasty).

2) There are only about 50 (and certainly not more than 90) grammes of chocolate per 2 liter batch of mole. That' really not a helluva lot. It doesn't taste like a Mars bar. Trust me.

3) There are actually several recipes for mole poblano that do not include chocolate at all (which I learned from Diana Kennedy's books).
 

Nothing can ruin a mole faster than using too much chocolate. I would recommend using some, however, do give it that dark, bitter richness. 

 

If you can't get real Mexican chocolate, use high-coco solid (70% or higher) baking chocolate, with some ground cinnamon and maybe a (very little) bit of ground almonds, and NO SUGAR. 

 

Once the mole is simmering, you can sweeten it to taste (I prefer it very un-sweet); but you want to remain in control of the sweetening, and chocolate with sugar added could give you a bit of "stealth sweetness".
That raps it up for the New World. But mole wasn't meant to be just a statement of New World supremacy. It also celebrates ingredients that Mexico wouldn't have without Spain. So with that, we move to our next continent...

Europe
1 Onion

Just as the ubiquity of the tomato belies its culinary importance, so the humble onion can often be overlooked. Yet it is essential to most European cuisines. It's even the answer to an Anglo-Saxon riddle.

But it's native to the Old World. It was brought to the Americas by none other than Christopher Columbus, and Mexico took it to heart. With the exception of the Yucatecan cebollas en escabeche, it is usally white onions that are used in Mexican cooking.

3 cloves of garlic

Another staple of European cooking that was introduced to the Americas by colonists.

Garlic, however, has not been so thoroughly integrated into Mexican cuisine. Diane Kennedy, the Julia Child of Mexican cooking, writes that garlic is not widely used in Mexico. Therefore there are only three measly cloves of garlic per 2 liter batch of sauce.

This begs the question of whether you can even taste the garlic in the finished mole (it is certainly not the strongest flavour, I can tell you). I can only think that Sor Andrea used it because she couldn't conceive of cooking anything for a Spaniard without starting with onion and garlic.

Bread

When Americans think of Mexican food, they think of burritos. (When Brits think of Mexican food, they think of fajitas, which aren't Mexican.)

This is because most of the Mexican food that made it into the US comes from northern Mexico, where the European imports of wheat and beef thrive.

In the rest of Mexico, the corn tortilla is king, and chicken, pork (and even goat) are the major meats.

But there is one wheat product that can be found throughout Mexico: a European-style leavened wheat bread called bolillo. I have not tried it, but it is supposed to be a lot like what Americans call French bread.

One stale slice of this is used to thicken the mole, along with one stale corn tortilla. I imagine this was used precisely to balance the traditional Mexican ingredient with a traditional European one, and prevent the sauce having some kind of independence or home rule agenda.

Raisins

There are two things the Spanish cannot live without - wine and olive oil.

So imagine their dismay when they discovered that neither grapes nor olives grow easily in Mexico.

Olives are not represented in mole at all, probably because there was no way of preserving them long enough to transport them from Europe to the New World in the sixteenth-century. But how could Sor Andrea contemplate her magic sauce in praise of the Spanish Empire without including at least one of Spain's culinary dynamic duo?

Of course, fresh grapes were not to be had, but they could get dried grapes or raisins. About 80 grammes of these are used in mole, almost twice the amount of chocolate, and much of the sauce's sweetness is undoubtedly due to the grapes.

Amazingly, you fry the grapes in hot fat for a few seconds until they puff up and turn golden (they really do that; I've seen it with my own eyes).

Stacked up against the exotic riches of the New World, Europe's contribution to mole may seem a bit bland. And I guess that's the point. All the world's most famous spices and herbs come from Asia or the Americas. Which is not to say that European cuisine, on its own, would just be meat and potatoes. Because potatoes come from South America.

Asia

Four or five centuries ago, if you had a couple of nutmegs, or some cloves, you could buy anything you wanted. If you had a ship full of these spices, you would be richer than most European governments of the time. The Dutch East India company, for instance, could afford to employ a private army larger than the army of any one nation in the world, at its time.

Today, any of these spices, with the possible exception of saffron, can be had for chump change at any chain supermarket in the developed world.

Some which were once the most valuable are now the cheapest and least appreciated. Black pepper is given away free on most restaurant and cafe tables, and sits gathering dust in practically every cupboard in the Western world.

"Vanilla", once one of the world's rarest, most exotic, and thus highly-valued spices, has become a synonym for "bland".

We take these things for granted so habitually that it's hard to imagine how they were once so valuable. Wars were fought over them. People risked their lives and happily took the lives of others for them. And they created virtually from scratch the wealth of huge new empires.

One of these empires belonged to Spain, and when creating the famous mole, Sor Andrea made sure she put a good helping of the newly acquired wealth of Asia into the mix.

Cloves and cinnamon

As I said above, these are two of the three tastes found in allspice, so presumably Sor Andrea could have just doubled the amount of these two and added a bit of nutmeg.

Perhaps she was trying to show off native Mexican spices in including allspice.

Or maybe there was a financial consideration. Cloves and cinnamon were two of the most expensive things on the planet at the time.

As it is, there's not a lot of these spices in the mole. However, unlike the garlic, onion, and tomato, you really can taste their presence. Partly this is due to the inherent power of these spices. That power is intensified by toasting the spices before you grind them. This makes your kitchen smell wonderful as well.

Aniseed

When I was a kid, liquorice was my most hated of all sweets.

Over the last ten years, though, I have developed a great appreciation for the taste of aniseed, when used in the right amounts.

There are few people, I think, who would like to be (as Greg Wallace has it) "smacked around the face with a big bag of liquorice allsorts", and when aniseed goes wrong, it's invariably because it is overpowering (like in all those disgusting spirits they sell in duty-free shops).

I was very keen to have aniseed present in my mole, because it provides the much-needed top note. Chocolate and the "darker", richer spices form the base notes, even the chiles are the mid-range; aniseed is that high pitch that completes the harmony of the dish.

You can use anything that tastes strongly of aniseed. I chose star anise because I had some left over from when I made the carrot and star anise soup.

And finally there are a series of ingredients which are hard to assign to a definite place. Such as:

Almonds

There are about 80 grammes of crushed almonds in mole.

Almonds certainly aren't native to America, but they don't come from Europe either.

They are originally from the Middle East. But they have been known in Europe since the Middle Ages, so they aren't part of the newly-acquired spice cabinet of colonial exploits in Asia.

Almonds are, after all, the main ingredient of marchpane, which was a sweet popular among the artistocracy of Tudor England.


Sesame seeds

This is the main seed used to thicken mole. Whole sesame seeds are even sprinkled on top of the finished dish, a visual indicator of the importance of the ingredient.

Sesame seeds come from Africa. But the thing is, although Spain did have territories in Africa (Morocco for one, and they still have the Canary Islands), that's not the reason they had access to sesame seeds.

The word "sesame" comes to English by way of Ancient Greek, which means it had made its way into Europe by in the ancient world.

1/8 tsp of coriander seed

So much of what I love about Mexican food is down to indigenous ingredients (chiles, corn, pumpkin, etc).

But if there is one herb which is absolutely intrinsic to Mexican food, it is what Mexicans and Americans call cilantro, but everyone else calls coriander. And coriander does not come from Mexico.

Of course, listing it under Europe would be kind of a stretch. I mean, it's not a big part of European cuisine, after all, unless you count the fusion food that was popular in the early noughties.

On the other hand, it's indigenous to southern Europe and the Middle East, so presumably it must have been exported to India and other parts of Asia, where it is most familiar.

In any case, it is the seed, rather than the leaf, of coriander which is used.

Coriander seeds can give a slightly citrusy top note to a dish, but it's doubtful whether you can really detect an 1/8 teaspoon of ground coriander seed in a 2 liter batch of mole. So once again I'm going to hypothesize that Sor Andrea, if she existed at all, used it because she felt obliged to use this gift of Imperial Spain that was probably already asserting its importance in the local cuisine.

She probably used seeds because the leafy herb part would have completely clashed with the other flavours, and she probably used so little of it because she didn't want it jostling with aniseed for the role of top note.

Recalling that there are three different types of chile used in mole, plus chle seeds, we're up to 22 ingredients. You also need some fat to fry things in and some water to make the stock.

Below is a photo of some of the seeds and spices which are to be toasted and ground. The stuff in the dish is ancho chile seeds.

Mole Poblano Prologue: I am insane

[First published 12 December 2011 - The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe - just before I took my Christmas break from posting. It sets out my plan for cooking mole poblano over the holidays.]

There is something seriously wrong with me.

I could spend Christmas happily eating leftovers, cheeseboards, chocolate, and other easy, unhealthy foods whole sitting on my ass watching bad television.

Instead, I'm going to cook something that has between 26 and 34 ingredients (depending on the recipe) and takes up to four days to prepare.

This Christmas I am going to attempt the national dish of Mexico: mole poblano de guajolote.

I'm not, however, planning to have this on Christmas Day. The traditional British Christmas dinner is the highlight of my year. But since we'll never eat all that turkey in one night, even with the obligatory midnight turkey sandwich, we'll still have heaps left over.

So I'm going to serve the leftovers with the traditional mole sauce. Right now, there are voices in my head saying "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

What makes this plan especially ridiculous is that I have some perfectly good mole paste in my fridge right now. It actually came from Mexico and is absolutely delicious (I've tried it). But no, I'm going to make my own.

I am a very sick man.

Amazingly, I already have all but three of the ingredients in my house, which is probably an indication of how much of MexiGeek. I even have some Mexican chocolate I got from Jordan Valley on Nicholson Street. I don't know why they had Mexican chocolate, but we found it when we went in for pumpkin mix before Thanksgiving.

What I'm missing is the holy trinity of mole: the three chiles, ancho, mulato, and pasilla, without which it just ain't mole. So it's another trip to Lupe Pinto's this weekend.

I have four possible recipes to use for this dish. The longest one, Rick Bayless's, takes 6 hours if you do it all at once, though he recommends spreading it out over several days.

The shortest one, Thomasina Myers's, only takes one and a half hours, but that's probably a masterchef-style blitz of activity that I could really do without on Boxing Day.

And in any case, all four recommend making the sauce in advance and letting the flavours mingle in the fridge. Fine by me.

However, it does put me in a bit of a bind. Ideally I would like to make a stock from the turkey to use for the mole. If I do that, I cannot start making the mole until the morning of the 26th at the earliest. But I am hoping to have the mole made and in the fridge by the end of Christmas Day.

Then all I have to do is heat it gently on the hob and serve.

There are only two options: either have the mole on the 27th (and risk having no more leftover turkey), or use a different stock. Sadly, I think it's option 2 for me, which is a shame, because I have never made stock in my like and I really want to.

In the meantime, I am reading and re-reading all four recipes and making notes, because as a further indication of my unsound mind, I don't intend to use any one recipe. I'm going to create my own variation based on the best bits of all four.

This goes even for the ingredients. I am using raisins because all four recipes call for them, but I am forgoing prunes, which are only called for in one recipe (and because I hate them).

My plan of attack so far is to prep the chiles by seeding and deveining them and cutting them into small, flat pieces on day one. Then I will toast the seeds and nuts and grind them in my molcajete.

On day two, which will be Christmas Eve, I will:

• Get up ass-early and drive to a farm to collect our turkey

• Fry the chiles and then soak them in hot water for an hour

• Roast and crush a tomato

• Fry almonds, raisins, onion, and garlic, in that order; then add them to the crushed tomato along with the ground seeds and spices, stale corn tortilla crumbs, stale brioche crumbs, and a bit of Mexican chocolate

• Blitz the chiles, sieve them, then fry them again until the mixture gets nice and thick

• Blitz the other stuff, fry it until it thickens, then add the chile mixture and some stock and simmer for a really long time

Once the sauce is done simmering, I can refrigerate it, or even freeze it. I plan to make a helluva lot, so I may freeze as much as half straight away.

Day three is Christmas Day. My mole sauce will be maturing in the fridge.

On day four, I will reheat the sauce gently on the hob, adding more stock if necessary. About 20 minutes before serving, I will add the leftover turkey. I am considering frying it in butter first, to give it colour and texture, and because frying things in butter rocks.

This may be the national dish of Mexico, but it can be a rustic dish in terms of presentation. Also, the sauce is unavoidably brown, and one thing I've learned from years of watching Masterchef is that it's very hard to make brown food look elegant.

Therefore I will be serving the mole on a neat stack of arroz verde, with a ring of sauce around the inner edge of the plate. The rest of the sauce will be in a serving dish on the table.

For an additional side I'm planning one of Thomasina's salads: a winter salad of caramelized pecans and goat's cheese. I would like to serve this on side plates, on a fried corn tortilla for additional texture.

Lastly, additional warm tortillas will be in a basket on the table.

Anyone who would like to join us for dinner, leave a comment.