Oaxaca: Mole 5 & 6 – The Red Mole Mix-Up

It was bound to happen – the more we got into these moles, the more things would get complicated, and things have gotten a lil complicated

One of the moles here is mole coloradito – you might translate this as ‘tinted red’ mole. This is distinct from mole rojo (also…’red’ mole???), although the difference between the two is unclear. Also unclear is whether ‘coloradito’ as you see it advertised on the street is mole or not. Puerco en chile colorado is essentially braised pork in red chile sauce, but it’s definitely not mole. So when there’s ‘pollo coloradito’ here, is it mole or is it just chicken cooked in a red chile sauce??? Impossible to tell??

I decided I would do what I do best – put this off. Walking around 20 de Nov. market, I saw a single place that advertised mole rojo, and happily sat down and ordered it. Most places have coloradito but nowhere said ‘mole coloradito’. I tried not to think about it.

The mole was good, spices, fork-tender perfectly cooked chicken, blahblahblah you’ve read enough descriptions of mole that we don’t need to go over that. I WILL point out that these tortillas were just incredible. Tearing them felt like pulling apart a soft tissue and they were slightly sweet and just a little toasted while still somehow pillow-soft. Honestly with just a little butter I could eat a stack of these on their own.

But after I was done, I decided I needed a plan for mole 6, so I leaned over the counter and asked the lady there if I could ask her a question.

I started with something basic – what’s the difference between mole colorado and mole rojo?

Well, she told me, in fact the mole I just served you is actually mole coloradito.

And that was the first time in my stay here that I had been so egregiously backstabbed in Oaxaca

I’ve never seen the Hills and I assume you have not either

She told me that in this market, since a lot of tourists come through, people don’t really make mole rojo because it’s so spicy it doesn’t sell well. She told me that mole rojo is actually more like just chicken cooked in the kind of salsa we put on tacos. She said mole rojo is a sauce made of tomato, garlic, chile, salt and pepper, picking up the salsa they have on the counter and tasting it, wincing a bit as it was spicy even for her.

That salsa was really tasty (and yes, really spicy), but it wasn’t what I would call mole.

So in the end I had mole coloradito, and possibly this was the same thing that was available everywhere else. And mole rojo, possible, is a mole that doesn’t have the nuts, spices, chocolate, and thickeners of other moles. Or maybe the lady was wrong?

One of the difficult but beautiful things about cultures is that they are shared orally and passed down generation to generation in imperfect ways. In this place that is less touched by the internet, traditions are capable of changing quickly and drastically. As sad as that is, it also leaves a lot of room for growth and the accumulation of intergenerational wisdom! Whether or not this is ‘traditional’ mole, there’s beauty in a dynamic, living culture that comes from small changes over time ❤

Oaxaca: Mole 4 – Estofado and Mercado 20 de Noviembre

If I’m being completely honest I still don’t really know what mole estofado is.

I know what’s in it, and it’s some weird ingredients: capers, raisins, and olives are unique to estofado, and it doesn’t have as much chile as others. In addition it has absolutely no chocolate, so the flavor that’s left is sweet, mild, and even a little fruity without the bitterness or smokiness that other moles have. At the end of the day it’s chicken cooked with a sauce that is sweet, mild, spiced, and just a tiny a touch smoky. You know what we call that in the USA? We call that BBQ chicken.

This is just Mexican BARBECUE CHICKEN.

But where does it come from? what does its name mean?

Well, this mole has more influence from Spain than any other mole here, borrowing the base ingredients of Spain with the spices indigenous to Mexico. It is truly a mix of the two cultures, the bright side of a dark history of colonialization and erasure of thousands of years of history and culture. Even the name, ‘estofado’ seems to be a reference to the kind of stewed cooking that Spaniards were familiar with when they first traveled to Central America. It’s pretty difficult to trace back the history of this kind of mole (assuming you, like me, only have wikipedia and basic internet searches to augment asking questions of Oaxacans.)

So. Where did I get this one? In the south part of Centro de Oaxaca is a market called Mercado 20 de Noviembre. May that’s an unwieldy name for a market but it is named so  because it’s on the street 20 de Noviembre. Maybe that’s an unwieldy name for a street but you know what I’ve had enough of your criticisms.

This market mostly has 2 things: eateries and bakeries. There’s people selling tamales or other small things in the pathways between the booths, there’s a Mayordomo selling chocolate, but largely you go here if you need a meal or bread.

All the eateries are pretty similar, so they have to get people’s attention some way. At the height of activity, Waitresses will yell out to you passing by, waving a menu very close to you, shouting either “de comer, joven” or just listing the food that they have available. I don’t know if anyone has ever been swayed by this tactic, but I know plenty of people who do not enjoy being here because they get agitated having people yell out at them the entire time they are walking through the market.

Nonetheless, if you find a good one or if you need some of that daily bread, this is a nice, safe, and accessible place to come and eat (and I guess take pictures without people making a fuss Dx)

Oaxaca: Mole 3 – Verde and Comida Corrida

I only have two more weeks here! FUCK.

With that in mind, let’s get straight to the point. What’s so special about mole verde? It is, unsurprisingly, green. As you know, mole’s main ingredients are nuts and chile. Thus, the distinct feature of mole verde is that it is made primarily with pepitas (shelled pumpkin seeds) and green chiles. Beyond that, it is flavored with whatever other green shit someone’s mom had on hand: tomatillos, green onions, epazote, spinach, celery, cilantro, parsley, chard…mole verde doesn’t so much have a recipe as it has a singular goal: be fuckin green.

The taste is less spicy and more herbacious compared to other moles, as close to ‘light and refreshing’ as a mole sauce can be. This can be the dish you serve to your friends who want Mexican food but don’t eat spicy food because they hate joy and fire-pain-love-taste.

The mole verde I had was part of a restaurant’s comida corrida. Around 3pm, many restaurants offer a deal on a set menu that changes every day. These are usually pretty decent food at a really good rate, so if you know anything about me you know I’m all over these. As you know from the previous posts, these meals have multiple parts! They always start with a kind of soup – in this case, it started with a thematically-appropriate cream of spinach soup

What was I supposed to do with the salsa? SALSA DOESN’T GO IN SOUP

The cream of spinach was good, the crouton was *spectacular*.

Comida corrida almost always comes with a choice of a side of rice or spaghetti. Yes, spaghetti. A shockingly ubiquitous side in Oaxaca, people actually seem to prefer the spaghetti based on what I’ve seen. I don’t know what kind of weird historical cultural exchange happened where spaghetti became a cultural staple, but here we are. For the record, I always order the rice.

Finally, it comes with the main dish, handmade tortillas, and agua fresca in more flavors than I thought was possible: horchata, pineapple, lime, mango, tamarindo, and guava are the ones I have personally tried (I told you I was all about the comida corrida)

Although this isn’t always the case, sometimes comida corrida comes with a little dessert. This dessert is the thing that tickles my particular little heart because it’s always the same thing: a little jell-o. One of the fun facts about David is that he is weirdly delighted by gelatin, and Oaxaca was a perfect place to come for that. There are little carts on the streets selling cups of gelatin with interesting flavors like vanilla-and-sherry. Women in open markets sell nicuatole, a gelatinous corn dessert that kind of tastes like solid horchata. Heck, even the cake shops here have elegant jell-o rings studded with fruit ❤

Oh man I am super craving jello now, I’m gonna get some nicuatole tomorrow.

 

Oaxaca: Mole 2 – Negro and Chocolate

The story goes that in the state of Puebla (Oaxaqueños will tell you it was in Oaxaca and will literally fight you on this), an archbishop was coming to visit a convent unexpectedly, and the nuns had no food to serve him. In a hasty attempt to welcome him, they killed and cooked an old turkey and made a sauce out of the only things they had on hand: spices, chili peppers, nuts, bits of bread, and chocolate. The archbishop loved it, and a national dish was born: mole.

As I’ve mentioned, I grew up with only one type of mole and it was this one: mole negro. As far as I know, there isn’t another savory dish as well known as mole negro that so effectively incorporates chocolate as a main player. In the US they’ve discovered that chocolate’s bitterness complements red meat nicely; chocolate and espresso rubs on steaks are becoming more common in higher end dining establishments. But it’s still a distant second to mole, both in flavor in accessibility.

Oaxaca is particularly known for its chocolate – a friend of mine claims that Oaxacan chocolate is so distinct that he can recognize it on the street by smell alone. Even without the ingredients added to mole sauce, the chocolate here is spicy and aromatic. Mayordomo, the big chocolatiers in Oaxaca, has chocolate houses all over the city which offer raw cacao, jars of mole sauce, and chocolate paste for making chocolate drinks. The cafes they run are whimisical eateries that serve fluffy and moist pan dulce next to warm, frothy mugs of hot chocolate that they mix and pour in front of you. You can order smooth, silky mole over chicken with rice, or in fluffy tamales (yes, there are tamales of chicken mole here!). It’s a charming place to have a quaint breakfast or lunch.

Stolen from Google, hope they die mad about it

Theobroma cacao, the scientific name for chocolate, translates to “food of the Gods”; accordingly, these folks serve it up in their own little patch of heaven ❤

Anyway, that mole I had was pretty good. It wasn’t at Mayordomo, but I was still v into it.

Oaxaca: Mole 1 – Amarillo & My Favorite Restaurant

For the uninitiated, “mole” has two syllables.

I grew up with one type of mole, the kind most people know about in the US – a sauce made of chocolate and chili (and tbh like 25 other ingredients) usually served over chicken. It’s delicious and I thought it was all I needed, but I was proven wrong when I came to Oaxaca and learned there are not 1, not 2, not 5, but 7 (SEVEN) different types of mole for which this state is known for.

S I E T E.

As if my life was designed by an amateur television writer, I am in Oaxaca for exactly seven weeks. One type of mole a week? I think I can handle that.

Not Pictured: The refreshingly delicious cucumber water this meal included

Astute readers have figured out that the first type of mole I tried is mole amarillo. They also have a question: are all Mexicans colorblind or are they well aware that this mole is not amarillo? Indeed, mole amarillo (oftentimes just called ‘amarillo’) has the same red-orange tint of many sauces in Mexican food, but interestingly, it is not named for its color. While it contains many of the same ingredients common to the different types of mole here (which I am realizing more and more is just the Mexican version of the concept of a curry), amarillo is unique in its inclusion of saffron, which gives a distinctive yellow tint to foods that are less pigmented.

Now, did I taste this and think ‘oh wow, what a robust saffron flavor’? Obviously not, I have the tongue of a boxed-wine-drinking plebeian. Was it flavorful and delicious nonetheless? It absolutely was. This meal was in what is now my favorite restaurant in Oaxaca, just two blocks away from where I live, and cost a total of 40 pesos.

40 pesos is just under $2.25. For a little more than two bucks, I had a bowl of nourishing vegetable soup, some spanish rice, chicken mole amarillo, warm handmade tortillas, and a small pitcher of lightly sweetened cucumber water. Unlike many of the small hole-in-the-wall eateries here, the atmosphere was a little less “plastic dishes and homey” and a little more “place mats and square plates”. With the exception of the smooth jazz covers of American music (hearing “Let It Go” on a melancholy saxophone is a confusing experience in any context), the atmosphere was warm but somewhat sophisticated, kind of like a hipster coffee shop but without the irritating pretentiousness. I ate the comida corrida (more on this later) peacefully, reading on my kindle and generally feeling comfortable and content.

In a place that is far from home, where there are definite hints of foreign-ness, finding such comfort and joy is a treasure.