Tacos de Chichilo con Res y Hoja de Aguacate

Oaxaca claims seven moles. Chichilo is the one nobody talks about outside the state. That should tell you something about how poorly this cuisine is understood.

Chichilo is the burned mole. Not smoky, not charred for drama. Burned. You take corn tortillas and cook them on a comal until they are black, crumbling, and past the point where any other recipe would tell you to throw them away. You do the same with the seeds from the chiles. The tortillas and the seeds go into the blender with everything else and they give the mole a bitter, ashy depth that no other sauce in Mexican cooking can replicate. It sounds wrong. It tastes like Oaxaca.

The chile that makes this work is the chilhuacle negro. It grows in the Canada region of Oaxaca and almost nowhere else. Without it, you are making a different sauce. The hoja de aguacate, avocado leaf, is the second signature. You toast it on a dry comal until it curls and the kitchen smells like anise. That perfume runs through the whole dish. In the Valles Centrales, senoras add the toasted leaf to the broth and grind more into the mole itself. Double the dose, because the flavor needs to hold against the bitterness of the char.

I collected three versions of chichilo from cooks in the Central de Abastos in Oaxaca city. One used beef shank with the bone. One used a mix of beef and pork. The third, the oldest woman at the stall, used only beef ribs and told me the bone marrow was half the flavor of the broth. I believed her. My version here uses bone-in beef shank because it gives you the collagen, the marrow, and the meat all in one cut. The ejotes cooked in the chichilo broth at the end are not a garnish. They are part of the dish. Cada estado, su propia cocina.