Mole sauce

Ed gave me all these spices for Christmas, that I figured I should do something grandiose and involved with them. A mole sauce sprang to mind. Back in the day when I worked downtown, my favorite lunch ever was the chicken mole burrito from the burrito cart. I figured I could work some magic on my own, and make one of these fancy-pants mole sauces.

After some research, it turns out there is no set recipe for mole. It's basically just a rich sauce that has lots of spices in it, sometimes as many as 40 ingredients. It seems that the common denominator is chiles, as well as toasting the spices before using them, to get a nuttier flavor. I can do this. I looked up a couple recipes, and settled on something in the middle of like three of them. Quantities here are approximate...

Mole
Made about 4C sauce
You'll want a food processor for this.

Veggies:
3 whole, dried, ancho chiles, de-seeded
3 whole small red peppers, de-seeded
1 onion, diced
5 cloves garlic, sliced
3 tomatillos
1 tomato
Thickeners:
1/4C almonds
1/4C pumpkin seeds
1/4C raisins
1/4C masa flour
Spices
2 tbs sesame seeds
6 whole cloves
12 black peppercorns
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2tsp ground star anise
1/2tsp cinnamon
1/2tsp ground coriander
1 tsp marjoram

2oz chocolate

As I said above, everything has to get toasted. This is a long process. Make sure you don't burn anything, because that is not good eats - that's burned. Start with the chiles: Take out the seeds, tear them into pieces, and soak them in warm water for 30 minutes. Ancho chiles are already smoked, I believe, so there is no need to toast them first. Although I suppose you could. After 30min, the soaking water will be a beautiful dark red color. mmmm.

Meanwhile, toast the thickeners - put the almonds, pumpkin seeds, and raisins on a sheet pan, and bake at 350F for about 5-10 minutes. Keep a close watch on these, you really don't want to burn them. They're done when the raisins puff up into little balls of hot fruitiness. It's pretty cool. You could pull out the pumpkin seeds and raisins and do another 5min on the almonds, if you felt so inclined. Put those three things in a food processor, and blend until they make a fine paste.

Toast the whole spices in a small cast-iron skillet on the stovetop. The sesame seeds, peppercorns, cloves, and cumin seeds should take ~5min until your whole kitchen is smelling delicious. Once those are toasted, add them to the food processor (or a spice grinder, if you have one), and grind them as finely as you can. Next toast the ground spices - these are even more subject to burning, so again, be careful. Once they're toasted, put everything in a quart saucepan, since that's where it'll end up anyway.

Slice a shallow cross in the bottom of the tomato and tomatillos, so they don't pop, and broil those until the skin is black and peeling off. Peel the skin off, and puree in the food processor, then add to the saucepan.

Sweat the onions, and then toast the garlic. Add those to the food processor, and also add the chiles, and 3/4C of their soaking liquid. Grind it up. Add to saucepan.

At this point you've toasted and ground up everything except the chocolate. I hear Mexican chocolate is best for this, maybe cocoa powder would also work, I used... chocolate chips. They were fine. Heat up the stuff in the saucepan, adding water or chicken stock until the consistency is more sauce-like and less paste-like, and dump in the chocolate. Stir it around, until the chocolate is melted. Remove from heat. If the mixture isn't fine enough, run it all back through the food processor, or a blender, since at this point it is liquid-y enough to do that.

Done! Only a few hours of your day wasted =).

Of course, what to do with the mole sauce is up to you.  I used it as an enchilada sauce.  I forget what was in the enchiladas, but I do remember that the sauce was delicious.  You could also put it in tacos, burritos, serve it with any sort of grilled meat or tofu... endless.  And delicious.