Cooking Class: Mole Negro and Quesadillas

I just spent a most pleasant morning at a cooking class with Pilar Cabrera, chef of "La Olla" restaurant in Oaxaca. We have been consistently delighted with the food at her restaurant and as soon as C tasted her mole de fandango, he said I really ought to take her cooking class and get that recipe! So I did.














We started by preparing some of the ingredients for the mole. She had them already measured out.













We took the seeds out of the chiles and roasted the chiles and the garlic on a comal (a large flat ceramic dish) over a charcoal fire.













Pilar sauteed the other ingredients in a ceramic casserole over a charcoal fire, starting with the nuts,














then moving on to the raisins, the bread, the spices, and the plantain.












Finally, she toasted the chile seeds over the coals until they were black. That made for some seriously lung burning smoke.













Then we went to the market, where we bought ingredients for the rest of our meal. We bought huitlacoche and bean blossoms from this woman.












I learned a few new things there about some of the ingredients, like the difference between quesillo doble crema and plain quesillo. It made me wish I had more time to spend enjoying the new foods I learned about: queso botanero, a salsa sold at the butchers, blue corn tortillas and fresh salsas at the entrance, the best vendor for fresh vegetables...









Then we stopped at the molinillo, where they ground our mole ingredients in a big grinder. They had a different grinder for each of the things they grind: coffee, corn for tamales and tortillas, cooked black beans, rice for horchata, and the one for mole. They ground first all the spices, nuts, bread and plantains, then the dried chiles, adding just enough water to make a good paste.













Back at her house, we started with the rose petal sorbet: we cooked together sugar, milk, blanched almonds, and dried and fresh rose petals, then cooled it in an ice-water bath, blended them in a blender, then froze the mixture in an ice-cream freezer.










In the meantime, we prepared the ingredients for the quesadillas. We cleaned and sauteed huitlacoche with a bit of garlic and salt. Huitlachoche is a highly prized corn fungus that has a delicious mushroom taste - they call it the Oaxacan truffle. I never dared try it before this visit, but I'm so glad I have. We also sauteed pretty red blossoms from a bean plant - they kind of look like scarlet runner bean blossoms. We shredded quesillo doble crema, the stringy Oaxacan cheese that vaguely resembles fresh mozzarella. We chopped yerba santa and cleaned squash blossoms.





We toasted and peeled chiles de agua (hot green chiles) and tomatoes,













then I ground them into a salsa with a molcajete - starting with garlic and sea salt, then adding the chiles and then last the tomatoes and a bit of green onion. We made a minted rice with soaked and drained rice, sauteed in garlic and onion, then cooked with chicken broth and a few sprigs of mint. The staff did all the clean up as we went, and they also washed the produce and cooked the chicken for the mole. It was amazing how much faster so much cooking went with their skilled help.







We went back into the courtyard where we had cooked over the charcoal fire and cooked the mole,



















then made little tortillas and made them into quesadillas with the different fillings: squash blossoms, bean flowers, and huitlacoche, all with a bit of hierbasanta, which is an herb you can only find here that tastes more like fennel than anything else I can think of.

After everyone else tasted some mescal with lime, orange, and sal de gusano (salt ground with chiles and -yuk- maguey worms), we sat down to a feast of quesadillas with the fresh roasted tomato salsa, mole and rice, and the rose petal sorbet for dessert.



Pilar was a good teacher, giving lots of details and answering lots of questions. She was very personable and patient (even with the British woman in our group who thinks Mexican food is "stodgy" and had never even heard of tamales - I still can't quite figure out why she took the class).

All in all, an excellent experience!








Mole Negro

Serves 10

4 chilhuacle chiles
8 mulato or ancho chiles
8 pasilla mexicana chiles
3 tsp. lard
1/4 c. almonds
1/4 c. raisins
1/4 c. pumpkin seeds
1/4 c. peanuts
1/4 c. pecans
4 slices of egg bread
1/4 c. sesame seeds
1 tsp. dried thyme, marjoram and oregano
2 cinnamon sticks
1/8 tsp. anise
3 whole cloves
1/8 tsp cumin
3 whole black peppercorns
2 plantains, cut in slices
1 tomato, roasted
3 tomatillos, roasted
3 cloves of garlic, roasted
1/2 medium onion, roasted
4 cups chicken broth
8 pieces of cooked chicken
3 tsp. sugar
1/2 cup Oaxacan chocolate
salt to taste
4 avocado leaves

Preparation:
1. Clean the dried chiles with a damp cloth. Open the chiles by making a lengthwise slit down one side of each. Take out the seeds, veins, and stems. Reserve the seeds.

2. Fry the chiles in a saucepan. Remove each chile from the saucepan as soon as it begins to change colors and blister, and place them in a bowl lined with absorbent paper towels.

3. Fry the raisins until they puff up and brown a bit. Remove the raisins and add the almonds, pecans, and peanuts, frying for 5 minutes until they are a dark brown color. Fry the pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, cinnamon, anise, cloves, cumin and black peppercorns, until they obtain a deep brown color, remove them and add the dried bread pieces in the remaining lard for 2 minutes, then remove.

4. Fry the plantains in oil until they are golden.

5. Roast the tomatoes, tomatillos, onion, and garlic on a comal. Peel the tomatoes.

6. Place in a food processor the spices, tomatoes, one plantain and 1 cup of chicken broth. Blend until the mixture is smooth. Transfer to a blender and blend again until as smooth as possible. Put into a bowl and set aside.

7. Place the toasted chiles and 1 1/2 cups of chicken broth into the food processor, then blender. Blend until the mixture is a smooth paste.

8. Heat the remaining unused lard in a deep, very hot pot (le crueset or cast iron are good substitutes for the ceramic dish) and pour the blended chiles into the pot. Cook for 3 minutes, then add the spice mixture and cook for 3 more minutes. Add more chicken broth as needed.
Add the sugar and chocolate, and stir for 5 minutes. The sauce is ready when, while stirring, you can see the depth of the pot.

9. Add the rest of the chicken broth and avocado leaves. Season with salt. Cook for 3 more minutes over medium heat. Add the pieces of chicken before serving.

Please note that I added photos (finally) to my post about the baptism.

Christmas Day in Oaxaca

It was kind of an odd day. We started the day with breakfast with our host family and decided it must have been leftovers from their Christmas Eve feast rather than some sort of traditional Christmas breakfast. We started with bananas, then thick slabs of caramel jello and chopped bits of bright green apple jello, then spaghetti in a creamy mushroom sauce, then chicken breast stuffed with fruits, then finished with sandwiches of thin sliced ham lunchmeat with mayo on Pan Bimbo (the Mexican Wonderbread equivalent). Z and I rushed off to church, but found it locked and empty and had to assume they had cancelled because it was Christmas.

We wandered back to our place, stopping to sit in a park and talk for a while, then found C moving all our things into a new room when we got back. Our new room is upstairs, and we have a kind of balcony (without any railing) where we can sit in the shade of a pomelo tree and listen to all the songbirds while we eat or work or relax.

For lunch we ate at the fantastic La Olla Restaurant. Z ordered tacos with nopales (cactus) and after finishing about half decided that their sliminess was grossing her out a little too much. C & I agree that nopales are mucous-like and that we don't really like them any more than we like okra, but we were pleased that she wanted to try them.


C ordered chiles rellenos, Oaxacan style. I had some a couple days earlier at the restaurant Flor de Oaxaca and they were tasty, but made me pretty sick that night. At La Olla, they came in two types of chiles - one was stuffed in a dried Oaxacan Pasilla chile (smaller and smokier than the chiles called pasillas in other parts of Mexico), and the other in a chile de agua, which is light green and thin-skinned and usually medium spicy. The stuffing here, called picadillo, rather than the ground beef or cheese that you might get at a Mexican restaurant in the U.S., is made of shredded chicken with almonds, raisins, capers, green olives, herbs, tomatoes, onions and a long list of other ingredients that make it as complex and lovely as a good mole. They stuff the chiles, dip them in a batter made of whipped egg whites mixed with the yolks and a bit of flour, then fry them and bathe them in a light tomato sauce. There's a recipe from Diana Kennedy here which looks pretty accurate. These at La Olla were the best I've ever had.

I, however, won the best ordering prize for the day - I got a thick white fish, perfectly seared in garlic and olive oil, served with spinach and over mashed plantains. It doesn't sound so great, but the three together were perfection.












We also ordered ponche, which is a hot fruity punch kind of like spiced cider, with tiny apples, spears of sugar cane and cinnamon sticks, and hibiscus blossoms.











And we finished with a delicious cake of freshly ground oaxacan chocolate and cinnamon and a bit of passionfruit puree on the side, and then a very tasty flan.









Yum.

That evening we went down to the Zocalo briefly, hoping there would be a replay of the fireworks from the night before (which I missed because I was sick from those darn chiles rellenos from Flor de Oaxaca), but we were out of luck. Just lots of people walking around. We read the Christmas story and watched some fireworks from our balcony before we said goodnight to Z. Overall a pretty merry Christmas - I hope yours was good too!