Mole Blanco

A mole defined by a refusal — nothing in the pan is allowed to take any colour at all.

Chicken. Not vegetarian — contains chicken.

Ingredients

• 150 g blanched almonds
• 60 g pine nuts
• 60 g hulled sunflower seeds
• 1 slice white bread, crusts off
• 2 güero or banana chillies, pale yellow
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• ½ white onion, peeled
• 1 small piece white cinnamon, or ½ ordinary stick
• ½ teaspoon white peppercorns
• 2 cloves
• 1 kg chicken breast, poached, with 1 litre of its broth
• 100 ml double cream
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 tablespoons oil
• corn tortillas, as on their own page, to serve

Method

1. NOTHING IN THE PAN IS ALLOWED TO TAKE ANY COLOUR AT ALL, and that refusal is the entire dish. Every other mole on this site is built on colour: chillies fried dark, seeds toasted brown, tomatoes charred black, the sauce simmered until it deepens. Here each of those steps is done and deliberately stopped early. The nuts are warmed, not toasted. The garlic and onion are softened in oil over a low heat and taken off before they catch. The bread is dried, not fried. One almond allowed to brown shows up as a visible fleck in a pale sauce and a browned batch turns the whole thing beige, which is the one thing this mole cannot be.
2. THE CHILLIES ARE PALE ONES AND THEY ARE NOT TOASTED. Güero or banana chillies, yellow-green and mild. They go in raw, softened briefly in the broth. Any dried red chilli, however little, tints the sauce pink, and toasting even a pale chilli darkens it.
3. IT IS WHITE PEPPER AND NOT BLACK, FOR THE SAME REASON. Ground black pepper leaves visible dark specks through a pale sauce. White pepper is the same spice with the hull removed and is slightly sharper, which is worth knowing rather than treating them as interchangeable.
4. IT IS STRAINED TWICE, WHICH NO OTHER MOLE HERE NEEDS. A pale sauce shows every fault: a trace of almond skin, a fragment of cinnamon bark, a shred of chilli. Through a sieve, then through it again, and what comes out is genuinely smooth and genuinely ivory.
5. THE CREAM GOES IN OFF THE HEAT AND AT THE VERY END. It lifts the colour and rounds the nuts out. Simmered in, it can split in a sauce this thick with nut solids, and a split cream in a white sauce is immediately obvious.
6. The almonds, pine nuts and sunflower seeds warmed in a dry pan over a LOW heat 2 minutes, stirred, only until they smell faintly nutty. NOT coloured. Taken off at once.
7. The bread dried in a low oven 5 minutes until crisp but still WHITE. Not toasted.
8. The chillies split, seeds removed, and simmered in 200 ml of the broth 5 minutes until soft. Not charred.
9. The oil warmed in a pan over a LOW heat and the garlic and onion softened 6 to 8 minutes, stirred, until translucent and NOT browned at any edge.
10. The white peppercorns, cinnamon and cloves ground to a powder.
11. Everything blended with 600 ml of the broth, in batches, until very smooth.
12. STRAINED through a sieve into a pot, and then STRAINED A SECOND TIME.
13. Brought to a bare simmer and cooked 20 MINUTES, stirred often. It should thicken and stay IVORY; if it darkens the heat is too high.
14. The poached chicken breast sliced and warmed in the sauce 5 minutes.
15. The pot taken OFF THE HEAT and the cream stirred in. Tasted and salted.
16. Served with tortillas.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Mexico · All recipes