Mole Coloradito Oaxaqueño con Pollo

This is from Oaxaca. Specifically from the Valles Centrales, where coloradito is the mole that families actually make at home, not the one they reserve for weddings and Day of the Dead. Mole negro gets the postcards. Coloradito gets the Sunday lunch.

Of the seven moles of Oaxaca, coloradito sits in the middle. Smoother than amarillo, sweeter than negro, redder than rojo. The color is the work of chile ancho and chile guajillo, toasted on a comal until the oils release, then soaked in hot water and blended with charred tomatoes, sesame, almonds, raisins, ripe plantain, and a piece of chocolate de mesa from the molinos around the Mercado 20 de Noviembre. The chocolate is not the flavor. It is the binder. If your mole tastes like chocolate, you used too much. Asi se hace y punto.

The technique that makes this dish a mole and not a sauce is the frying step. You pour the strained chile puree into hot lard and you stir for fifteen minutes while it sputters and darkens and the fat works its way out at the edges. La manteca es el sabor. I have watched senoras in Teotitlan del Valle stand over a clay cazuela the size of a wagon wheel doing exactly this, with a wooden paddle, for an hour. They do not flinch when it splatters. Neither should you.

My mother did not make Oaxacan mole. She was from Jalisco. But the first time I ate coloradito at a comedor in Tlacolula, sitting at a wooden bench beside three women in trenzas, I understood why this dish takes a generation to teach. There is no shortcut. There is no blender setting that replaces the toasting, the soaking, the straining, the frying, the simmering. No me vengas con atajos. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Oaxaca.