Whack-a-mole

How did the Mole turn out? I’m intimidated by the recipe, is it really that hard to make?

At the risk of sounding gastrocistic (narcissism + food = love of your own cooking), the mole was good. Similar to what damp, cold to chilly day does for soup and fresh bread - a sunny, warm to hot day would have made this specific food taste better but it is Oregon in April – so that one is on me. Still even with a little rain, spicy food, cold beer, good dinner company, I was happy.

As for the difficulty of making Mole Poblano; yeah and no. Depending on the particular recipe, there are 26-30 ingredients requiring all the stovetop skills: deep-frying, sautéing, toasting and poaching. Off the heat, there is a fair amount of hand work: cutting, dicing, measuring, deseeding, mortar & pestleing, pureeing and there really aren’t any shortcuts…Deep frying dried chilies causes the unique feeling that someone set off pepper mace in the kitchen but it has to be done this way. Like garam masala (curry), the spices come alive when they are dry sautéed/toasted/bloomed - they just can’t be measured into a pot. The spices, almonds and sesame seeds absolutely need to be ground in a mortar & pestle; blenders and food processors leave little chunks, which in this case, aren’t cool, not at all.

Mole is like another recipe that scares the bevishnu out of home cooks, puff pastry. People get the idea only skilled, master bakers can get the dough to rise. If you can make pie dough, you can make puff pastry – actually, because you don’t have to worry about keeping the butter properly sized, puff pastry might be easier to make. Similarly, Mole Poblano isn’t so much about skill, as it is about time and organization.

There is also the lesser issue of technique – If you can do more in your kitchen than reheat the food you bought at a cart, you can make mole. Deep-frying isn’t rocket surgery; the fryalator is the starting point for trainees out in the fast food enterprises. The mortar & pestle; turning things into a paste by repeatedly hitting them with a stick: if you can listen to the radio during a pledge drive, you understand the repetitive, slow-paced, dull rhythm necessary to complete this requirement. The hardest part of the recipe might be the dry roasting of the spices and the poaching – these two critical steps need to be done at really low heat. Everybody loves high heat, cooking is flame and fire and action and reaction, right?

If you want to get in the kitchen and reel off an exquisite dinner, this isn’t the recipe for that style of cooking. Much like genoise cake or candy making, tasks that require attention and high concentration, don’t really work to my strengths. But you can make a really good mole if you set aside a couple of hours for 2 or 3 days to complete the different tasks required by the recipe. 

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