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Mesoamerica · Volume 01, The Highland Mole and Maize World

Mole Verde

Central Valleys, Oaxaca

Mole verde, a bright herb and tomatillo mole: a vivid, clean green sauce ladled over a piece of poached pork, the surface smooth and glossy rather than flecked, a few pale green beans and a wedge of chayote visible at the edge of the pool.

Illustration

Time
1 hour 30

As tradition built it

Mole verde

Serves 8. About 1 hour 30 minutes.

Ingredients

The pork

  • 1kg pork leg, in pieces
  • 60ml oil

The green sauce

  • 500g tomate verde (tomatillo)
  • ½ onion
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 chile serrano
  • 120ml water

To thicken and finish

  • 3 tbsp masa
  • 1 leaf hoja santa
  • 1 sprig epazote
  • 1 sprig parsley
  • 480ml green beans, cut in half
  • 1 chayote, cubed

Method

  1. Blend the tomate verde with the onion, garlic, chile serrano and water. Set the sauce aside.
  2. Brown the pork in a pot with a little of the oil, turning it until it is crisp on every side. Pour in half the sauce, stir, and cook over a medium heat for 40 minutes.
  3. Blend the masa with half of the remaining sauce, the hoja santa, the epazote and the parsley. Add it to the pot and cook for 20 minutes.
  4. Add the green beans and the chayote and cook for another 20 minutes.
  5. Keep it below a hard boil the whole time. A fierce boil dulls the green.
  6. Serve with white or red rice, and queso fresco crumbled over if you like.

Notes

The recipe is INPI's, from its 2021 recetario Mulli, Oaxaca: la tierra de los moles. Its text uses half the sauce on the pork and half of what remains with the masa, and does not say where the last quarter goes. Teresita López Nava, a cocinera tradicional from Zimatlán, makes hers on a beef spine broth with chile de agua, cilantro, cloves and cumin, strains every blended addition, cooks the herbs only five minutes, and pours the mole over potatoes, beans and chayote cooked separately.

What a modern chef changes

Late-added chilled herb, sous vide pork

Rung 02

Method

  1. Blend the raw herb component in a high-power blender at the very last moment, chilled, and fold it into the finished, already-cooked tomatillo-and-masa base off the heat, rather than blending everything together and reheating, protecting the volatile aromatics that boiling destroys.
  2. Pass the finished sauce through a chinois for a genuinely clean, bright green rather than the slightly grainy result a home blender alone gives.
  3. Cook the pork leg sous vide separately to a precise, still-moist doneness, added to the sauce only at the point of serving.
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