Tamales Oaxaqueños de Mole Negro con Pollo

Oaxaca has seven moles. Seven. Most people outside Mexico know one, maybe two. That tells you everything about how poorly this cuisine is understood.

These tamales are wrapped in banana leaf, not corn husk. That is not a variation. That is Oaxaca. The banana leaf gives the masa a different steam, greener and earthier, that corn husk cannot replicate. The shape changes too: flat rectangular packages, not the upright cylinders of Mexico City. If you use corn husks, you have made a fine tamal. You have not made a Oaxacan one. Cada estado, su propia cocina.

The mole negro inside is the most complex sauce in Mexican cooking. Chilhuacle negro, mulato, pasilla oaxaqueño, chocolate, plantain, bread, burned tortillas, burned chile seeds, more than two dozen ingredients before you stop counting. The chilhuacle is the recipe. It grows almost exclusively in the Cañada region of Oaxaca and there is no real substitute. If your chile vendor does not know what a chilhuacle is, find a different vendor. The burned seeds and burned tortilla are what make this mole negro instead of mole rojo. Skip them and you have a brown sauce, not a black one.

My mother did not make Oaxacan tamales. She was from Jalisco. But she had a page in her notebook, a recipe copied in pencil from a woman she met at a church bazaar in 1987, almost illegible. I made these tamales for the first time when I was twenty-six and they were not perfect. They were close enough to make me understand why Oaxacan cooks take this so seriously. The masa is silkier than the masa I grew up with. The leaf perfumes the whole package. The mole soaks in slowly while the tamal steams. This is a two-day project, sometimes three. No me vengas con atajos. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.