Oaxaca - How I made Mole Negro

You can learn a lot about another culture by preparing one of their traditional dishes.  Latin American food has more or less caught on in other parts of the world and most of us will have tried fajitas or burritos at some point.  In fact, I've even made enchiladas before, when I was blogging about Honduras, last year in March.

For Oaxaca, I wanted to try something more ambitious so, after some research, I settled on one of Mexico's most complicated dishes, Mole Negro.  I'd only ever heard of mole (pronounced mo-ley) in US movies and TV series, usually mentioned by a homesick Mexican character!  My main challenge was to conceptualise 'mole' - I had no idea (and I'm still not 100% sure) what a mole should look like, or taste like . . what's its texture should be.

I'll mention at this point that I don't think I was entirely successful at conceptualising/making a mole so, if you're looking for a perfect guide to mole-making, you should probably look away now!  The difference between what I'm doing in this blog and what others do in more 'foodie' blogs is that I'm learning about the culture of the place I'm blogging about, rather than expecting perfect results.  The learning experience is the result, if that makes sense?

Mexican ingredients

Dried Mexican chillies

Mole has a lot of ingredients, usually around 25 different things go into a mole sauce.  It was important for me to put the right kind of chillies in my mole, so I travelled around London trying to source as many authentic Mexican ingredients as I could find.  

My first stop was the Casa Mexico in Bethnal Green but, unfortunately, this shop was closed, even though it should have been open, according to information I found online.  I can't really recommend this shop because of this, although others have given it good reviews.  

Not to worry - wasted journey to Bethnal Green, but I was able to hop down to Borough Market at London Bridge, which is a great place to pick up all kinds of speciality foods.  For my Mexican ingredients I went to the Cool Chile Company and I'd highly recommend this for London readers who are searching for Mexican ingredients.  

Profiting from the Columbian Exchange

Four kinds of chilli

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned the Columbian Exchange which saw new foods from the Americas spreading to Europe and beyond.  My experience making mole involved three traditional Mexican ingredients; chilli, chocolate and tomatillos.  

The chillies were dried and I managed to get my hands on four different types: Guajillo, Mulato, Chipotle and Pasilla.  Most of my experience with chillies to date has involved fresh chillies and it was quite an interesting experience to cook with these dried Mexican chillies, as I got a new sense of the texture of chillies - the fact that they can have nutty, smoky or fruity tastes, rather than simply being hot and spicy.  The texture of the dried chillies was a little bit like worn leather, but they also reminded me, bizarrely, of my youth, when my grandfather would give me dulse, a kind of dried seaweed which is popular with older people in Ireland. 

It's hard to believe there was ever a time when we didn't consume chocolate (believed to come from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word xocolatl - xococ = bitter and atl = water).  I'm a big fan of chocolate, although it's only as an adult that I've tasted 'real' chocolate, the bitter Latin American kind that is best served as a drink or sauce.  I love cooking with chocolate and I was happy to find delicious Mexican chocolate at the Cool Chile Company. I think my mole tasted more of chocolate than anything else - perhaps I went a bit overboard!

Real Mexican chocolate

This was also my first time to prepare tomatillos and I'm still fascinated by this fruit which, although it looks a bit like a tomato, it has a different taste and is surrounded by paper-thin leaves, which you need to remove before cooking.  I like cooking new things, so I was excited about my first experience of tomatillos and I look forward to preparing them again some time in the future.

Tomatillos

The recipe

I looked at a lot of mole recipes when I was researching this dish - each one seemed to be more complicated than the last and I was surprised to learn that it would take at least five hours to prepare this dish!  I eventually settled on a recipe from La Cocina de Nathan, which seemed marginally less complicated than the others and I enjoyed Nathan's amusing approach to cooking.  I didn't blacken the tortillas, as he suggested and I also adapted this recipe to suit my own needs.  

Here are the ingredients that I used (I've included the Zapotec words, where I could find them):

For the stock:

Ingredients for Mole Negro

2 chicken breasts - pechuga de pollo/buyu

2 chicken legs - pierna de pollo/buyu

1 bell pepper - pimiento morron

2 onions - cebollas

garlic - ajo

4 tomatoes - tomates/bichooxhe

cumin - comino

3 bay leaves - hojas de laurel

chicken stock - caldo de pollo

Chillies - Chiles/Guiiña

Mulatto chillies - chiles mulatos 
Pasilla chillies - chiles pasillas - pasilla means 'little raisin' and this chilli has a fruity flavour
Guajillo chillies - chiles guajillos
Chipotle chillies - chiles chipotles - chipotle means 'smoked chilli' in Nahuatl language

Other ingredients

Best to prepare the ingredients before cooking

5 tomatillos - tomatillos
1 plantain - plátano/biduaa
2 slices of bread - pan
sesame seeds - semillas de sésamo
handful of peanuts - cacahuetes
handful of raisins - pasas de uva
1 cinnamon stick - rama de canela
black peppercorns - granos de pimienta negra
3 cloves - clavos de olor
chocolate - chocolate/dxuladi (the Zapotec word was also borrowed from Nahuatl language)
corn tortillas - tortillas de maiz/gueta

Making the mole

It wasn't that difficult to actually make the mole - just complicated and time-consuming, there is a lot to remember.

Basically you start by boiling the chicken in water and adding all of the vegetables and other ingredients to make a chicken stock.  I boiled the chicken and vegetables for around 1.5 hours, after which I put the chicken aside and added some of the stock to my mole.  I think this is probably where I went a little bit wrong - as I was trying not to add too much stock, my mole ended up being more of a paste than a liquid.  If I was making this dish again, I would add all of the stock to the other mole ingredients.

Boil the chicken

And the vegetables

Put the cooked chicken to one side

For the other mole ingredients, it's just a matter of frying everything - plantain, tomatillos, half the tomatos, one of the onions, spices, nuts, seeds, raisins and chillies. Once all of the ingredients had been fried (and this took a bit of time), I put the fried chillies and raisins into a pot, covered them with stock and boiled them for about twenty minutes.

Plantain

Peanuts, peppercorn and cinnamon

Fried chillies releasing their oils and flavours

Fried bread, of the French variety

Fried tomatillos, onion and tomatoes

Sesame seeds

Peanuts, raisins and cinnamon

After that, I blitzed all of the ingredients (except the chicken and chocolate) in my food processor, adding some stock (but not enough) to create a kind of mole paste.  I then put the paste in a saucepan and added the chocolate, bringing this to the boil before simmering for about half an hour.

Chillies and spices in chicken stock

Blitzing the ingredients in my food processor

Heat the mole paste in a frying pan

Add chocolate

Finally, I heated the corn tortillas, put the chicken on top and added my mole paste. This should really have been a proper sauce, but I didn't make it liquidy enough and should have put all of the stock and other ingredients into the food processor in batches.

Mole Negro with chicken and corn tortillas

Nevertheless, it was a fairly tasty meal and I ended up with lots of mole paste which I've been eating on toast ever since - yum yum!

Chicken with mole sauce

Image credits:

All images were taken by me on my trusty Canon EOS 1100D.  Feel free to re-use these images with the Creative commons license:

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Liberia - How I made Palava

Palava is a dish that is quite common across West Africa and combines some of the most typical ingredients available in this part of the world.  The Liberian version is very similar to the palava made in other countries. And it's not at all unlike Chakalaka, which I made when blogging about Lesotho. 

I've come across the word palava or palaver already during my research, as the name of the meeting houses in Liberian villages, where elders make important decisions about community issues.

We use the word palaver in English, in quite a negative way, to describe an unnecessary fuss, eg. What a palaver!  It's thought that the origin of the word might be from Portuguese palavra which means word - although the palava dish is so spicy, I couldn't talk much as I was eating!

Liberia is the 32nd place that I've blogged about and the fifth African one - for each place that I've blogged about, I've tried to cook one of their national or regional dishes.  I have to stress at this point that this is a blog about culture, not a blog about food (although the food posts are always very popular!). 

If you want to see a proper food blog about palava have a look at Celtnet.org where I got my recipe - this is a great resource for any interested in 'world food' and I've used this website many times.  I also found a really cool foodie blog called Kayotic Kitchen which has a great chicken palava recipe.

My intention when blogging about food for Learning about the World is to understand the food culture in the places I blog about, by comparing the ingredients and trying to recreate these national/regional dishes with what I have available in my local shops in London.  I quite often have to (or even want to) substitute some of the ingredients in the original recipes and this process, in itself, is part of my learning experience.

The ingredients:

Ingredients for Liberian palava

500g goat meat - the original recipe had beef, actually, but goat meat is popular across West Africa and, as I had never cooked goat meat before, or even tasted it, I want to see what it was like.

300g dried fish - except I used fresh fish!  I can picture the stalls full of dried fish in Waterside Market in Monrovia, a clever way to preserve fish in the hot weather, but finding dried fish in London isn't that easy - when we eat dried fish in the West, it's usually a snack with beer, not part of a meal. 

It was also very weird cooking meat and fish together in one dish - I checked a few palava recipes and most of them seemed to have this option.  I'm not sure why cooking meat and fish together is weird for me, perhaps it's a cultural thing?  I realise that many people in Liberia would be happy to have either meat or fish, so perhaps adding both is an extravagance that makes the meal something special?

20g fresh ginger (grated) - Liberians love their ginger and so do I!  Palava is actually the name of the sauce that is used in this dish and ginger is a key ingredient.

4 Scotch Bonnets - Scotch bonnets are incredibly hot chilli peppers and I've only cooked with them once before, when I made chakalaka.  I must admit, I chickened out this time round and only added three of them, not four, as recommended by the recipe - the dish was still pretty hot with three Scotch bonnets in it!

2 small onions - one to form the basis of the palava sauce and the other one for cooking with the meat, sauce and fish

I used spinach/palak instead of bitterleaf

2 tomatoes - also to make the sauce

A bunch of spinach - the original recipe recommends bitterleaf, but this is something which isn't to find in Europe.  I guess I could have sourced some dandelion leaves, if I'd gone to a health food store, but spinach seemed like a good, leafy substitute, even if it doesn't have the same level of bitterness.

1 stock cube - I used beef

How I made Liberian palava

I started by preparing the palava sauce - the recipe suggests pounding the onions, chillies and tomatoes in a pestle and mortar, but I'm not a big fan of pounding, so I blitzed everything in my food processor instead. 

Put the onion, ginger and chilli in a food processor - or pound them with a pestle and mortar, if you prefer!

Add the two chopped tomatoes

Palava sauce, which is much hotter than it looks!

Next I prepared the meat.  Goat's meat is quite tough and could be chewy, so it should be boiled for about an hour to soften it up a bit.  I mixed the beef stock cube with 200ml of water, then put it in a saucepan with the goat's meat, brought the whole to a boil, then reduced the heat and simmered it for one hour.

Prepare some stock - I don't know if there is such a thing as a goat stock cube?  I used beef

Simmer the goat's meat for about an hour to tenderise

Lovely chunks of goat's meat!

Whilst I was simmering my goat's meat, I prepared some rice, to accompany the meal.  Actually, fufu would be more traditional and I've made fufu before when I was blogging about Togo, but the reality is that many people in West Africa have rice with their main meal, so I wanted to do the same.  

After an hour of cooking the meat, I took it off the heat - drained the stock into a jug and put the meat pieces to one side.  I then fried the second onion, the palava sauce and the fish pieces, until the fish had cooked through.

Fry the onion and palava sauce, then add the fish pieces

Fry until the fish pieces are fully cooked

After this, I added the goat meat and spinach leaves, pouring the stock and some water on top, until the spinach was covered and I let meat, fish and vegetables stew for about fifteen minutes, until the spinach had cooked and the whole thing had taken on a fiery, soupy look!

Add the goat's meat pieces

Then the spinach

Then the stock and water

It was dead easy to make - I'm not sure goat's meat is my favourite thing in the world and I think I would have enjoyed this dish more with either meat or fish, perhaps not both.  Nevertheless, another world food dish to add to my growing recipe book! 

Liberian palava served with rice

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