-Mole is sacred to a huge group
of people in Mexico.
It's really hard to put
parameters around Mexican food,
and I think mole
is a great example of,
if you just kind of go
with the flow
and you have your palette
of ingredients,
it can really go
all sorts of places.
♪♪
Hi.
My name is Claudette Zepeda.
I fancy myself a little bit
of a cultural anthropologist
of Mexican cuisine.
Today, we're gonna work
on mole.
You'll see some recipes
that have 60 ingredients.
I really don't understand
why people are super-proud
of having really long,
tiring recipes.
Mole can be made in a household
within 20, 30 minutes
if you keep it simple
and you focus on the flavor
and not the complexity of it.
It stops being a mole
when you don't have seeds
and chilies and spices.
We have chili pasilla,
chili ancho, and chili guajillo.
Mole is one of those recipes
that, also, some people say
that it came from the Spanish,
but, in fact,
it is a pre-Columbian sauce.
There's really no recipe
if you follow some guidelines
of the ingredients' start.
What did Mexico have?
We had tomatoes, pumpkin seeds,
corn, avocado leaves.
We had herbs, spices,
but initially mole --
herbs, chili, pumpkin, tomato.
Right here, perfectly adequate
mole -- a sauce, a starter.
And then, after that, you can
kind of riff all over the place.
We're gonna toast sesame seeds
and the chili seeds.
One of my favorite moles
is a chichilo negro,
or recado negro,
from the Yucatán.
They literally put a box outside
in the middle of the jungle
and torch it.
They light it on fire.
It's this giant metal box.
All the ingredients get
basically incinerated.
Right before it turns
into gray ash, and they stop it,
and they blend that
with sour orange, vinegars,
and it is one of the coolest
pre-Hispanic Mayan chili pastes
that there is in our cuisine.
It's pretty cool.
You can't do it indoors
'cause it will be, like, a
pepper spray bomb in your house.
So, that has toasted.
Add the spices.
You have your cloves,
peppercorns, oregano,
star anise, thyme, and cinnamon.
I'm gonna drop a few chilies
into my oil.
And from here, we're gonna go
ahead and fry up raisins,
almonds,
pumpkin seeds, and peanuts.
From its inception
to where it is now
and to the different regions,
just in Oaxaca to Puebla,
I've never had the same mole
taste the same.
I've had one woman
make a chichilo
that tastes beautiful
with all these different notes.
I've had another woman
make a chichilo, the same mole,
and have it taste
drastically different.
You know, there's
a little joke that --
It's, like,
how much do you add?
Well, until the ancestors
whisper in your ear,
"Yeah, mija."
This is called a Spanish peanut,
or a red-skinned peanut,
in most stores.
This is the only peanut
we use in Mexico.
The original Chinese peanut
is what we grow all over Mexico.
And in Oaxaca specifically,
in the coast,
there's fields and fields
of peanuts growing.
This oil is going to be
more flavorful
as I add
every single ingredient
because it's absorbing the
previous ingredients' flavors.
I always try to figure out
what our food
would have been like
without different,
you know, ethnicities
coming to our country,
the different migration
periods --
the slave trade,
colonialization, all that stuff.
If we were to make a salsa,
take the onions and garlic out,
it is bland.
Our food was enhanced so much
by the addition
of these ingredients
that landed on our soil.
We really made the best of it.
♪♪
Avocado leaves, bay leaves --
Also get toasted.
Imagine this is, like,
a LEGO set,
and this piece doesn't
fit with this piece. It's okay.
There's more than one way to get
to the end result of a mole.
Fry up the bread before
I do the tomatoes last.
Last, but not least, you just
want to fry the tomatoes.
They're not gonna obviously
get a color like the chilies.
You just want to fry them
until they get a little soft.
One of my favorite moles
is a -- called chintextle.
They use dried shrimp heads
and dried chilies
with aromatics --
onions, garlic,
and it is almost identical
to a Chinese XO sauce.
So it teaches us that there's --
there's
not one thing that's unique.
From region to region,
in -- in Oaxaca and Puebla,
someone's born,
there's a mole.
If someone dies, there's a mole.
It's cool to taste them all
and see, like,
their interpretation of them.
In European families, you have
your crest with your last name.
For the moles, in families,
it's the same thing.
Every family has their mole,
and it's incredibly personal.
And I'll teach it
to my daughter,
and then she'll change it
when she gets to her kids,
and that's, again,
how you move cuisines forward.
Everything is fried up,
toasted, ready to go.
You first want to start with
making sure
you grind all of your spices,
and the good thing about moles,
it's something that can
kind of outlive you.
You can make a mole base
and continue to feed it.
The more you feed it, it --
the more flavor,
the more complexity
that develops,
and then you have, you know,
what I call a perpetual mole,
a mother mole that you can leave
in your inheritance
to your family.
So, we're gonna go ahead
and pour this
into a fine mesh strainer.
That is that.
Once it's strained,
it's kind of a --
Looks like marble.
We're gonna just
cook this down.
So, here, we're gonna use
Oaxacan chocolate.
So, we know mole was
before the conquest.
We know mole was initially
a sauce that was being made
with indigenous cultures
and the Aztecs, Zapotecs,
the Olmecs.
As religious kind of crusades
went through Mexico,
they brought gifts,
if you would -- the ingredients,
the -- the addition of onions,
garlic, chocolate.
Chocolate was obviously
being consumed in Mexico,
but it was not
being consumed sweet.
It evolved by mere necessity,
what they had available
and what they could
consume regularly.
As humans evolve,
so does our food.
So, I'm gonna add
a little bit of salt.
You have your silky mole
that has gotten
a little bit deeper in color
through time and patience.
It goes right now from, like,
this terra-cotta red,
to completely brown,
to almost black
just through time.
I'm just gonna show one
really easy way to eat mole.
So, here, we're gonna just
chef it up.
One tortilla. We're gonna
fold this right in the middle.
♪♪
♪♪
Yeah.
You don't need much.
Simple things are meant
to stay simple.
And it's just a sauce
on a tortilla.
So there's, like, beauty
in both --
the complexity of it
and the simplicity
of the end result.
I want this to be something
that people stop being afraid of
and the folklore that it has
to be 100 ingredients.
I just -- I don't --
I don't subscribe to that.
♪♪
♪♪
