It was another cold and rainy day, so I made a fire in my fireplace. At this point, it is almost a reflex to want to cook with that fire, so today I decided to create a mole colorado, Oaxacan style. (Pronounced "moh-lay".)
A mole is a sauce, and this particular one needed to be tomato-based. My challenge was to create it without a specific recipe. I wanted to make it using general guidelines for moles and many of the traditional ingredients as I had read about them.
The guidelines are:
- Moist ingredients (tomatoes, onions, garlic) - char the exterior on a comal or dry skillet
- Dry ingredients (chiles, spices, nuts, seeds) - toast on a dry skillet
- Blend everything together with just enough water
- Simmer until the flavors meld and the sauce thickens
Some of the ingredients I picked were not appropriate for charring or toasting, so I held those out until the blending step. But I get ahead of myself.
My Creation
1 large brown onion, unpeeled
4 Roma tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
3 New Mexico chiles
3 costeño chiles
1/4 cup white sesame seeds
1-3 inch long stick of cinnamon plus another 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 allspice berries (you might want more)
1 ounce bittersweet chocolate
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 teaspoon salt
about 2 1/2 cups water
First I needed to char the tomatoes, onion, and garlic. The onion was big, so I cut it in half and placed the pieces cut-side-down on the dry skillet. The tomatoes went whole over hot coals. The garlic cloves were also placed in a dry skillet.
Coals cool down and sometimes they do that faster than I anticipate, so the garlic and the tomatoes got moved around as needed to find the heat. You can see in the picture above that the live fire was closest to the pan with the onions, so that is where the garlic and tomatoes ended up.
I wanted to do more than just char the onion halves on the cut side. I wanted them to be pretty cooked once they were ready to leave the fire. So after they cooked on the cut side, I turned them to cook on the skin sides. In all, they were on the fire the longest and were soft almost all the way through. They also got a nice char on the cut side.
I charred the garlic with their skins on until the skins split. This had cooked the garlic to soft. The chiles were charred in the dry skillet until they had turned mostly black and puffed up.
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| The big chiles are New Mexico, the small are costeño. Note the garlic cloves. |
The tomatoes didn't get much charring but they did get soft and the skin broke up.
I toasted the sesame seeds until they smelled nutty, which also made them more ivory than white in color. Toasting the cinnamon stick didn't change its appearance much, but it smelled more spicy than usual. The whole allspice berries also smelled a little fruity once toasted.
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| Use more allspice |
Once everything was done with the fire, I moved to the kitchen. I removed the peel from the onion and the garlic cloves. I did not remove the stem ends from the tomatoes. I pulled off the stems from the chiles and removed their seeds.
All the ingredients went into the blender *in batches* with some water to get it all moving. This included the chocolate (broken into pieces) and the raisins but not the ground cinnamon and salt.
The first batch needed one cup of water. Once that was blended, I poured most of it into a kettle. I left some behind to act as liquid for the next batch, which only needed 1/2 cup water to get it going. The third and fourth batches didn't need more water at all when I left some of the previous batch with them. Then I used about 1 cup water to rinse out the blender jar.
All batches went into the same kettle, then were stirred together. This means it is not important what ingredients went into which batch -- as long as they were blended to smooth each time and added to the kettle. By "smooth", I mean that there were no visible chunks, even though the mixture looked grainy. The chiles became tiny, dark flakes in the liquid, so it wasn't perfectly smooth looking.
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| This is smooth! |
The kettle went onto the fire, where I put coals below it, a few around it, and it was near the live fire. I stirred it often. I also rotated the kettle so the hot side near the live fire was switched with the cooler side away from the fire. I added more coals around the edges as needed.
It started steaming quickly. Sometimes it bubbled and blurped on the hot side, reminding me to stir it more.
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| See the blurp? |
I tasted it occasionally. Before cooking, the dominant flavor was raw tomato, bright and acidic. I knew the mole had to cook at least until that raw tomato flavor was gone. That took about 30 minutes. Then the dominant flavor was onion (it was a very large onion), and I wanted to cook the sauce long enough to get that onion flavor blended with the others. That took about another 30 minutes.
After 1 hour of cooking, I decided it needed more cinnamon, so I added 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (untoasted) and it needed salt, so I added 1/4 teaspoon. I wish I had added more allspice, but I was reluctant just in case I over-seasoned it.
It cooked another 10 minutes when I declared it thick enough. You can see by comparing the first kettle picture to the one below that the level reduced about an inch, mostly from steaming.
Notice, too, that the color darkened considerably. That isn't from the lighting -- the uncooked sauce was red; the cooked sauce was brown.
The Verdict
I had some roasted pork tenderloin and some roasted turkey in my refrigerator, so I sliced them up and warmed them in the oven. A few slices went onto each plate, some mole was spooned over the top, and was garnished with sesame seeds. There were flour tortillas and a tossed green salad on the side. And wine!
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| Pretty! |
That flavor was ... complex... Not that this was unexpected, with all the different ingredients involved. It is just challenging to describe.
My guest taster thought there was meat in it, so I would say it had an umami taste. We both thought it was fruity, probably from the raisins. It was bitter, but not in a bad way. That could be from the charring, but also from the bittersweet chocolate. My guest taster had wondered if there was chocolate in it, and was happy to learn there was. I could taste the cinnamon but not the allspice. I wanted more of both spices.
I could not taste the garlic, but I don't know if it needed any more. I would say not.
The chiles were there, adding a lot of flavor and only some heat. I had been warned that costeños were hotter than what I was used to, and to use them with caution. This was good advice! While I didn't get a burn from the chiles, their heat was present. Maybe I could have put in one or two more, but considering I am a chile newby, it was good that I didn't.
The sesame seeds, surprisingly, didn't get broken up much by the blender. I was surprised at how many were still whole or nearly so after the mole was cooked. This added a nice little sesame flavor blast while I was eating it.
In summary, it was sweet, bitter, deep, rich, mildly spiced with a little chile heat. As I said, it was complex. We loved it.
The next day we heated up some of the pork roast, covered the slices with a fried egg, and spooned some mole over the top. That, with some flour tortillas, was breakfast. Excellent.
I don't know how my mole would compare to a "typical" mole colorado from Oaxaca. I don't think it matters. It was good and we wanted more. I achieved success.
