Holy mole (pun completely intended) I love Mexican food. So when I had the opportunity to have family over for a little Mexican feast in honor of my recent birthday, I thought this would be a good time to break out all those dried chiles, Mexican chocolate and oregano I had in my pantry. I could have gone a lot of directions, though I tend to enjoy the most simple APPEARING (key word) of Mexican dishes. A simple taco. Fajitas. Those I find pretty simple. But a mole? The savory and slightly sweet, yet nutty beautiful brown sauce looks like it may not be the hardest thing to make. So deceptively simple but so overwhelming delicious.

There’s 20+ ingredients in mole so it’s no small feat to make. Making a mole is an all-day affair and with the sheer volume I was making, it was going to require a lot of short stints of using the food processor, and then combining ingredients, and then using the food processor again and all in all, trying to figure out how to make a whole dutch oven’s worth of mole sauce in one sitting without chef’s kitchen grade level equipment. 🙂 What’s pictured above is maybe 1/3 of the sauce that was made and includes the shredded chicken I served it with.

This mole ended up having more of the consistency of a Romesco sauce (I think partially due to limited equipment to get a really smooth blend on the sauce). The end result did have a nice amount of heat (moreso than other moles I’ve had out) and all in all it made for a great celebration, paired with cilantro rice, black beans, salsa, and Tequila Sunrises!

Overall Level of Effort: 4

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Would Make it Again? No. (see additional notes)

Additional Notes: This was fantastic. HOWEVER…it was a lot of work for the output and while everyone loved the sauce, I’d almost prefer to just enjoy it out at a restaurant. I’ll get to enjoy it once again since I froze some of the extra sauce, but in the future, I’ll leave this one to the professionals.