Pastel Azteca de Mole Poblano

This is a poblano dish at heart, even when it shows up on tables across the central altiplano from Tlaxcala to the Valle de Mexico. Pastel azteca is what you make in Puebla when there is mole left over from a fiesta and chicken that needs to be used. It is not a shortcut. It is a second life for a sauce that took two days to build.

The mole is the dish. Everything else, the tortillas, the chicken, the crema, the cheese, exists to carry the mole and let it shine in a different form. If your mole is weak, your pastel azteca is weak. There is no hiding behind cheese. A good mole poblano has chile ancho, mulato, pasilla, and chipotle, plus almonds, sesame, raisins, plantain, bread, spices, and Mexican chocolate. Thirty ingredients minimum. If you are starting from a paste because you do not have two days, buy one from a Puebla maker. Mole Don Pancho and Rogelio Bueno are honest. The ones sold in plastic tubs at the chain supermarket are not.

My mother called this dish her Monday casserole. Sunday was mole day. Monday was pastel azteca with whatever was left, layered into a clay cazuela with day-old tortillas she had been saving in a cloth at the back of the counter. She would scatter sesame seeds across the top before it went in the oven and she would tell me, every time, that the casserole was better than the original mole because it was older. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and saber cocinar también es saber esperar.