Mole Coloradito Oaxaqueño

(Respectfully…Ripped off from Seasons Of My Heart: A Culinary Journey Through Oaxaca by Susana Trilling (Ballantine Books, 1999). Copyright 1999 by Susana Trilling.
(who has to be one of the coolest people I’ve met. Great cook, incredible cookbook. She’s one of those people that went to check it out and ‘went native’…blows your mind at every turn.)

8 servings
I learned to make this flavorful combination of chiles and spices from my friend and teacher Carlota Santos. She has a little restaurant in her home where my husband Eric used to eat quite often before I came to live in Oaxaca. She always joked that she lost her best customer when I started to cook here, but gained a friend in me when she taught me the dishes she knew he liked to eat! I spent hours in her kitchen learning about this mole and the tamales and enchiladas you can make with the leftovers.
Seasoning ingredients:
2 large onions, each studded with a whole clove
4 celery ribs with leaves
2 small heads garlic
4 carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
2 bay leaves
2 chiles de arbol
6 black peppercorns
2 sprigs fresh thyme or 2 pinches dried
2 whole allspice
2 tablespoons salt
1 1/2 chickens (about 4 1/2 pounds), cut into 8 servings, reserving the back and neck for stock
18 chiles anchos (about 9 ounces), stemmed and seeded
21 chiles guajillos (about 4 1/2 ounces), stemmed and seeded
2 black peppercorns
2 whole cloves
1 whole allspice
1 piece of Mexican cinnamon, about 1 inch long
1/2 small head of garlic, cloves separated
1 small white onion, quartered
1 pound ripe tomatoes (2 medium-large round or 8-10 plum), quartered
1 sprig marjoram or Oaxacan oregano, or ½ teaspoon dried
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon sunflower or vegetable oil
1/2 ripe plantain, sliced
1/2 bolillo or French roll, sliced
1 tablespoon raisins
5 whole, unpeeled almonds
3 tablespoons lard, sunflower oil, or vegetable oil
1/2 cup sesame seeds
2 bars Mexican chocolate (3 ounces each), or to taste
Salt to taste
In a heavy 7-quart stockpot, heat 6 quarts water and the seasoning ingredients to a boil. Add the chicken pieces and lower heat to a simmer. Cover and cook the chicken for about 35 to 45 minutes or until the meat is tender and the juices run clear when the dark meat is pierced with a fork. Remove the chicken, strain, and reserve the stock.
Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil. On a 10-inch dry comal, griddle, or in a cast-iron frying pan over low heat, toast the chiles on both sides for about 10 minutes, toasting the chiles anchos a bit slower and longer than the chiles guajillos because of their thicker skins. Toast them on both sides until their skins start to blister and they give off their aroma. Remove the chiles from the comal or pan, place them in a medium bowl, and cover with the hot water. Soak the chiles for 20 minutes, turning to soften them. Puree in a blender, using as little of the chile water as possible, about 1 cup. Pass the puree through a sieve or food mill to remove the skins.
On the comal, toast the peppercorns, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon stick. Quickly grill the garlic and onion, turning them often until they become translucent. Cool them, then puree the spices, onion, and garlic in a blender with ½ cup of the reserved stock. Set aside.
In an 8-inch cast-iron frying pan over medium heat, cook tomato pieces and marjoram or oregano with no oil until condensed, 10 to 15 minutes. First they will give off their juices, then they will dry out. Puree the tomato mixture in a blender then pass the mixture through a sieve or food mill.
In a medium frying pan, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil over medium heat and fry the plantain and bread slices until brown, about 12 minutes. Remove from the pan. Add more oil (if needed) and fry the raisins until they are plump, about 3 minutes. Remove them from the pan. Fry the almonds until light brown, about 4 minutes. Remove from the pan. Place the plantain, bolillo, raisins, and almonds in a blender with 1-1/2 cups of the reserved broth and blend until smooth. Wipe out the frying pan and put over low heat. Add 1 teaspoon of oil and the sesame seeds and fry until brown, about 10 minutes, stirring constantly. Cool the seeds and grind in a molcajete or spice grinder.
In a heavy 6-quart stockpot, heat 1 tablespoon of lard over high heat until smoking. Add the chile puree a little at a time, stirring constantly. It will splatter about a bit, but keep stirring. Lower heat to medium and after about 20 minutes, or when chile puree is thick, add the tomato mixture and continue to cook, about 15 minutes, stirring to keep the mole from sticking or burning. Add the onion and ground spice mixture and stir well. Add the pureed plantain mixture and ground sesame seeds, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes. Add 4-1/2 to 5 cups of the reserved broth to thin the sauce, then add the chocolate, stirring constantly. When the chocolate dissolves, add the salt. Let it cook down for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. The more time it has to cook, the better.
Return the chicken pieces to the broth and heat through. Add more broth to the mole if needed. The mole should be thick enough to just coat a spoon, no more. Place a piece of chicken on a serving plate and ladle a large spoonful of mole on top. It should completely cover the meat. Serve with corn tortillas.
Hint: You can use turkey or pork instead of chicken. If you want to make it less picante, use half the amount of chiles and the same amount of the other ingredients.

Ah yes, uh… last time I posted the bit about a hollandaise recipe, I got caught up writing about getting fired from some hotel circle San Diego job about 20 years ago. So caught up in fact, that I failed to actually include a recipe for the sauce, so here it is. It’s really quite easy to do…great on eggs, for eggs benedict…

3 egg yolks
2 teaspoon water
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Directions
Pour 1-inch of water into a large saucepan; over medium heat, bring to a simmer. Once simmering, reduce the heat to low.
Place egg yolks and 1-teaspoon water in a medium mixing bowl and whisk until mixture lightens in color, approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
Place the mixture over the simmering water and whisk constantly for 3 to 5 minutes, or until there is a clear line that is drawn in the mixture when you pull your whisk through, or the mixture coats the back of a spoon.
Remove the bowl from over the pan and gradually add the butter, 1 piece at a time, and whisk until all of the butter is incorporated. Place the bowl back over the simmering water occasionally so that it will be warm enough the melt the butter. Add the salt, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper. Serve immediately or hold in a thermos to keep warm.

It’s awesome here in Ogden today because it’s still quite hot outside. I am a hot weather person. I used to love living and cooking in San Diego. It’s no secret. Cooked for 8 years in Las Vegas as the Executive Chef of the Border Grill inside Mandalay Bay Casino, Hotel and Resort on the Las Vegas Strip…I like it hot. Hot, like Mexico and Mexican food…Las Vegas is trashy though… however, San Diego…I lived there on and off for a couple years, between bouts of San Francisco, learning to cook, losing jobs, you know, on to the next one. But San Diego, there was a truly great city.
There’s a lot of great food there. Some stupid food too…I got fired at one hotel for refusing to make hollandaise sauce from a powdered hollandaise sauce mix.

Every afternoon I put in several prime ribs to roast and I removed a couple of the cooked ones for service…this hotel, we sold tons of it. We served great big deadly slabs of prime ribs and topped it with space-age Hollandaise sauce that we made from a secret yellow powdered chemical mix. Better living through chemistry. Just add water.

I had been told to use it by the sous chef. He would get busted and I would get fired if I didn’t go with the yellow powder but I just couldn’t. I knew what I was supposed to do, but I could make it 10 times better with actual fresh ingredients and it costs less and takes half the time. So every afternoon when the sous chef walked away, I slipped around the corner to the refrigerator, grabbed the eggs and vinegar, clarified some butter and threw together some delicious hollandaise sauce. It takes about a second and a half. No one ever knew…until the fateful afternoon the Executive Chef caught me in the act and insisted that I use the powdered hollandaise sauce mix. I refused.

I said, no I won’t, this powdered sauce is garbage!
He said, in his Swiss accent, O.K. Chris! You must do what I tell you or you get off of my line and don’t come back.
Good! Fine! I’m too good for this kitchen anyway!
And I rolled up all my knives in my knife roll and I split. Of course I needed the job pretty bad, but I had my self-respect. I can be a little stuck-up. A little elitist…Believe me, it’s not that hard to make hollandaise from scratch. And then I was out the door and on to the next one…

I bumped into a local guy at the grocery store today; someone who recognized me from Sonora Grill. Out doing some Sunday family grocery shopping. We each introduced our respective families to each other and then we talked about cooking and specifically about making a roasted tomato, garlic, jalapeno salsa…and he was getting ingredients with which to make the salsa…we just had a good chat.
I grew up in a high population density type location, so it’s taken some time to adjust to the one-on-one that sometimes occurs in Ogden…my social skills need a bit of work. I was grateful for just being able to talk to someone about Mexican food. Just being a chef. Being able to eat as much food as I possibly can and then never getting too fat…A chef really doesn’t eat as much as folks might imagine. We’re too busy running around cooking. Another opportunity to be grateful; I get to go to work in the kitchen almost daily. It has truly been a blessing. Thanks, grocery store.

Courtney Larsen and I gave a Mexican BBQ/Carne Asada class last night at Sonora Grill. Thanks to all who attended. We had fun. Copies of the class recipes are always included, FYI, but for those who couldn’t get there last night I wanted to kick this recipe to you because this smoky, spicy, garlicky salsa was very delicious.

Courtney’s Carne Asada Salsa
5 large ripe tomatoes
4 tomatillos
1 great big white onion, peeled
2 Anaheim chiles
2 serrano chile
Kosher salt , black pepper and lime juice to taste
Put the ingredients on a skewer and grill them till charred, with tasty bits, not too too burnt, and then pulse all ingredients in a blender.

Someone asked me about a particular Mexican food preparation yesterday when I was at the bank getting some cash. She said it was marinated roasted pork with lemon and oranges and it was totally delicious but she just couldn’t remember the name of the dish. I said it sounds like Cochinita Pibil.
She said O that’s it! It’s Cochinita Pibil.
I said I love that dish. It’s one of my favorite things in life to eat that dish.
She goes yeah it’s sooo good.
I ignored the person standing nearby who said ‘O that’s not Mexican food.’

Mexican food isn’t just one cuisine, though some people tend to imagine that it is. Mexico is a big place and it encompasses a large and varied culinary tradition. Cochinita pibil is, as the name suggests, a suckling pig, roasted in a Pib. A Pib being the Mayan word for a small shallow rectangular pit used for cooking seasoned meats, which are wrapped in banana leaves in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. The dish was made popular in this country several years ago when it was featured in the film Once Upon a Time in Mexico…

 BTW, Here’s a recipe for Cocinita Pibil

4lbs. Pork butt cut in 3 inch cubes
8oz. Achiote paste
10 cloves of garlic
2 limes, cut in half
2 lemons, cut in half
2 oranges, cut in half
8 dry bay leaves
2 t. ground cumin
½ t. ground cinnamon
1T. dried oregano
1T. Kosher salt
2T. ground black pepper.

Squeeze the citrus fruit juice out, add everything together and mash it up with your hands until you have a bright pink paste that you’re rubbing all over the pork meat.
Next you’ll need
1 lb. of banana leaves
2 white onions cut in quarters
5 roma tomatoes cut in half

Line a baking pan with the banana leaves, add the pink achiote and citrus marinated pork into the banana leaf  lined pan and top with the onions and tomatoes. Fold the banana leaves over the meat and roast it in your oven at 325 degrees for 3 hours. Or until this sweet and sour pink cochinita meat just falls apart when you put your fork into it. Serve it with fresh tortillas and avocado slices.

 And get ready to freak out because it is gonna be a flavor explosion in your mouth!

I’d been living in San Diego for about a year and was trying to get out of the business of being a chef. Of course, however, cooking was the only thing I really knew. It was 1990…or ’91…

I got a call from a chef I’d previously worked for in Berkeley. He offered me a job as his Sous Chef at his new restaurant in the Shattuck Hotel. Well, I’d have to move back home to Berkeley. I asked my girlfriend if she wanted to sell her truck, pack everything we owned into a U-Haul and drive to Berkeley so I could take this job. She said, ‘sure, why not?’
So we quit our jobs, sold the truck, and gave notice that we were moving out of our apartment. We got a U-Haul and packed it with everything we had left. We were on the porch drinking iced tea when I got a phone call from the chef. He said, ‘Chris, I got bad news. I got fired.’
‘You got what? Why?’
‘I got in a fight with the Hotel owner. He insisted I put Caesar salad on the menu. I don’t want Caesar salad on my menu. It just doesn’t fit. It doesn’t work for me. Neither one of us wanted to bend on it… He insisted, I refused, and I got fired.’
‘What?! I love Caesar salad, dude. I have everything we own in a U-Haul and no place to live and now I don’t have a job? What’s wrong with Caesar salad? I totally love Caesar salad!! Are you out of your mind?!’

This, by the way, is my recipe for Caesar salad dressing.

Caesar salad dressing

2 egg yolks
1 whole egg
2T. lemon juice

1C. canola oil
1C. Pure olive oil
2T. lemon juice
2T. water
1t. kosher salt
2 cloves garlic
2 anchovy filets
More Kosher salt and add some fresh ground pepper to taste

Make sure the bowl of your food processor is clean and dry, put in the blade and then put the eggs and 2T. lemon juice in the bowl of your food processor. Turn it on and blend the eggs and lemon juice together. With the blade still spinning, add the oil, drop by drop. A good way to do this is to use a squirt bottle. Fill it with the oil and then drop, drop, drop. Whether you use a squirt bottle or not, after you have added about 2 tablespoons of the oil, in this way, you’re beginning to establish an emulsion and you can begin to add the oil in a small steady stream, until you’ve added all of it. Then add the rest of the lemon juice, water, salt, fresh garlic, and anchovies.

Traditionally, one would toss it with fresh Romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese and toasted croutons. That’s exactly how I have made it for the last 20 years and to this day I still love Caesar salad.

Anyway, we drove north that night, to Berkeley. I immediately applied for and landed, the job as the Sous Chef at the same hotel, but under a different Head Chef. Caesar salad was definitely on the menu. Make mine with extra anchovies…

The competition is stiff and there really is a tangible difference between a chef and a cook. Many people can cook delicious and excellent creative food, whether you’re well-trained in a classical kitchen or you cook at home and you just love it and adore it and your cousin Edith says you make the best ambrosia salad in town and you can always be found in your kitchen kneading a bowl of purple Peruvian potato bread dough, you still might not have what it takes. The reason being, a professional chef is just crazy enough to require a particular specialized mania for crazy ideas of a certain sauce, compote, salsa, salad, sorbet, strawberry soubise, curry coullis, or whatever…that only you know it’s going to work and you won’t sleep til it does, and you’re just loco enough to prove it.

You’ll need to have that slightly off-key commitment to working as a professional chef as part of your skill set.

Period.

Most good cooks are too smart to become chefs and many chefs forget how to cook once they start writing menus, watching food quality, organizing parties and special events, and all the other boring stuff that isn’t cooking.

You must become the food, Grasshopper.

Point being is that I’ve spent more years as a professional chef than years as a cook or a skateboarding teenage punk and I’ve known an awful lot of cooks who just don’t make it and several cooks that have blown my mind with their creative talent that seems to come out of like nowhere.

Doris Chavez was one of those cooks you meet that would change your whole way of thinking about food. No cooking school, Doris started out as a high school kid in L.A. and ended up as a line cook at Border Grill, a high-end, upscale Mexican restaurant in Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip. She was working for me, poor girl. I’d been bouncing back and forth between opening a restaurant in Pasadena and just coming off a street food eating trip from Mexico City, hadn’t been getting hardly anything more than like 4 hours of sleep a night, I’d just had a sous chef quit on me to take a job at Caesar’s Palace as a banquet chef so I was down to my last 2 sous chefs who were running the place while I was away, and while I was pretty sure I was in my right mind, it’s likely that I wasn’t.

I was on my phone at McCarran Airport, coming in from Burbank, asking my meat purveyor, Ali, “Hey, Ali! How you been? Did you get my whole pigs in at the restaurant? You did? O.K. Great, thanks, I got a go, Ali.”
I took a cab back to the restaurant and Doris was on shift. I said, “All right, Doris, let’s cook. We’re going to cut these pigs into parts and grill the chops and smoke the loins and brine the hams and braise the legs, right? You ever broke down a whole pig before?”

“No.”

“Perfect…give me my knife over there, will you? I’ll break em down. You make a sauce. Make it Mexican. Use chiles…something killer…”

“Uhh. What should I do?”

“I don’t know…make it good.”

I probably wasn’t the sweetest chef in town. But somehow she had the intestinal fortitude to go to work and this is what she made:

1 pound of cascabel chiles, seeds removed
1 pound of ancho chiles, seeds removed
12 cloves of whole peeled garlic, charred on a comal (a flat griddle)
2 whole yellow onions, peeled and cut in chunks
6 roma tomatoes
1 1/2 gallons of chicken stock
1 cup honey
½ cup sherry vinegar
kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Simmer together in a large pot for 45 minutes and puree in a blender till smooth as silk.

That’s all there is to it. The complexity of the sweet and sour, spicy and earthy flavors impressed me but the simplicity of it blew my mind. The other 2 sous chefs I had had given her the nickname Cholita and I called the sauce Cholita Sauce. It went on the menu as a steady staple sauce and it was fantastic. I promoted her to my 3rd sous position and she turned out to be pretty good at it.

Cholita is perfect on grilled double thick pork chops…Come to think of it, I’m going to run that as a special at Sonora Grill, in honor of Doris Chavez, La Cholita.

Need a reason to get on Twitter? (I did.) Read this:

Chefs boil recipes down to Twitter messages

Have more pumpkins than you can carve? Turn one of them into Pumpkin Soup, as shown in our most recent cooking class. Here’s the recipe:

1 whole large pumpkin

1 yellow onion, peeled and sliced

2 Tbsp. oil

1 quart chicken stock

1 tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. cumin

1 tsp. granulated garlic

1 tsp. paprika

1 cup heavy cream

1 stick of butter

Peel pumpkin and cut into long strips. Cut up onions and toss with the vegetable oil. Roast pumpkin and onions in oven at 375 degrees, or until well browned. Remove from oven and put into pot. Add the chicken stock and spices. Simmer together until the pumpkin and onions are soft, about 1 hour. Puree the soup in a blender, then put back on the heat and add cream and butter. Simmer another 15 minutes.

Top with toasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds), fresh cilantro, and sour cream.