Molé Chile Ancho

We actually took this cooking class ages ago (September 17, to be exact) and I'm just now getting around to making the recipe post. I KNOW, FOR SHAME. Oh well.

So, to begin: molé is the pre-hispanic word for sauce. There are about a million different types of molé because there are a million different types of chiles, not to mention every Dick and Jane (what would the Spanish equivalent of that be? Ricardo y... Jane? Hmmm, things to ponder) does their own thing with molé (of course). Each type of molé has a specific type of meat it's served with, usually with rice and tortillas on the side. And the spiciness, bitterness, sweetness, whateverness of the molé varies wildly by recipe. The molé we made was hardly spicy and very smoky with only a hint of bitterness (the good kind of bitterness; yes, such a thing exists).

We started by going to the market for, you know, a real authentic experience. Of course, our cooking instructor was the one buying all the ingredients while we were relegating to standing around and holding random things as he handed them to us, but we did get to watch our chicken filets get pounded!


I have to admit that all in all, I did very little of the actual cooking, as we had one pot of molé and eight people to cook it. But even though I have heard all about the painstaking process that is preparing molé, this seemed remarkably easy. So easy that I'm pretty sure any gringo can do it on their own, although you might need to go to a Hispanic or specialty food market to find the chiles, as I've never seen dried chiles at Ralph's.

Without further ado, the recipe!

Molé sauce:
125 grams chile ancho
6 tomatoes (chopped)
1/2 onion (chopped)
5 garlic cloves (chopped)
1 roll of bread (cut in halves)
1 large stick of cinnamon
oregano
pepper
sugar
vegetable oil

Rice:
1/2 kilogram rice (2 cups)
3 garlic cloves (chopped)
1/4 onion (chopped)
salt
vegetable oil

Chicken:
9 fillets
1 clove garlic (chopped)
salt

Directions:
Take seeds and veins out of chiles. Fry all molé ingredients separately in vegetable oil, then let sit in pot of water until soft. Add pepper and oregano.


Put rice and vegetable oil into pot and cook over stove. Blend garlic, onion, and salt in blender, then pour into the pot with rice.

Boil the chicken, garlic, and salt in a pot of water.

Take all molé ingredients from pot of water and blend with water from the chicken. Fill the blender up about halfway with the molé ingredients and use 1 cup of the chicken water. Repeat until all mole ingredients have been blended.

Use a strainer to filter the blended molé and remove all big chunks of ingredients. (This is very important, as some of the chile fibers can upset your stomach.) Filter sauce into a large pot cooking over stove on very low heat (it takes awhile to strain, and you don't want it to burn). Add sugar and salt to taste, but keep in mind it should be a bit bitter. To make the molé thicker, add pieces of bread blended with a little water. Once you've achieved the desired taste and viscosity, let the molé come to a very gentle boil if it hasn't already done so.

Serve mole sauce over the chicken with rice on the side.


¡Qué sabroso!