Thirty-something ingredients, seven hours of patience, and a recipe that travelled from a village outside Oaxaca to a Camden High Street kitchen. Mole is one of the most distinctive dishes in Mexican cooking, and one of the most misunderstood outside Mexico. Here's how we make ours at Frida Camden, where the recipe came from, and why we still bother with the seven hours.
Mole isn't a sauce. Mole is a category.
The first thing to know: there isn't one mole. There are at least seven traditional Oaxacan moles — negro, rojo, amarillo, verde, coloradito, chichilo, manchamantel — and that's only Oaxaca. Puebla makes its own. So does the Yucatán. So do home cooks across central Mexico, with regional variations and family-specific tweaks that go back generations.
What unites them is structure rather than ingredients. A mole is a layered, slow-built sauce that combines several toasted dried chillies, an aromatic base (onion, garlic, sometimes tomato), spices, nuts or seeds, a thickener (usually toasted bread or tortilla), and — in many varieties — chocolate. Each ingredient is toasted or charred individually, then ground together into a paste, then thinned with stock and simmered for hours.
The version we serve is mole poblano — Puebla-style, the most internationally recognised mole, the one the recipe-keeper of our kitchen learned from her grandmother in a village outside Oaxaca City. It's the chocolate one. It's not a chocolate sauce. Wikipedia's overview of mole is a reasonable place to start if you want a wider history of the seven Oaxacan moles and their Puebla cousin; the version that follows is specific to our kitchen.
Where our recipe came from
The mole on our menu was taught to us by Chef María's mother, who taught it to her in the same way it had been taught to her — by standing at the comal (a flat iron pan) and toasting each ingredient in the right order, by smell, by the colour of the smoke. The recipe was never written down until we wrote it down for the kitchen rota at Frida.
It's a thirty-three-ingredient recipe. Each one matters; nothing is decoration. Pulling out the cinnamon makes it flatter. Pulling out the plantain makes it less sweet at the back of the palate. Pulling out the toasted tortilla makes it thinner. The whole thing is held together by a logic that someone worked out two hundred years ago and that we haven't found a way to improve.
The thirty-three ingredients
The list isn't a secret. The technique is. But here's roughly what goes into our mole poblano:
The chillies (5). Mulato, ancho, pasilla, chipotle, and one whole guajillo. Each one is toasted on a dry comal, then deseeded and rehydrated in hot water.
The aromatic base (4). White onion, garlic, ripe plantain (yes, plantain), and ripe tomato. Charred — actually charred — under the broiler until the skins blister.
The seeds and nuts (5). Sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, peanuts, and a small amount of pine nuts. All toasted separately.
The spices (8). Mexican cinnamon (more bark, less sweet than Ceylon), cloves, allspice, anise, cumin, black pepper, oregano (Mexican, not Mediterranean — different plant), and a single bay leaf.
The thickeners (2). A piece of stale bread (white, country-style), and a corn tortilla, both toasted dark on the comal.
The dried fruits (2). Raisins and a small handful of prunes. They round the chilli without sweetening the dish.
The chocolate (1). Mexican drinking chocolate — coarse, slightly grainy, with cinnamon and cane sugar already in the disc. About 30g per pot. Critically, this is not cooking chocolate or cocoa powder. The two ingredients aren't substitutable.
The liquid (2). Turkey stock (preferred) or chicken stock, and lard. The lard is non-negotiable — vegetable oil makes a mole that's correct on paper and wrong on the palate.
The salt and the sugar. Both, in small quantities, added at the end to balance.
That's thirty-three counted ingredients, depending on whether you count the salt. Each one gets prepped separately. The whole thing comes together in a pot afterwards.
The seven hours
Mole is slow not because it needs to be — the cooking itself is patient rather than active — but because each step has its own pace.
Hour one is toasting. Each chilli, each seed, each spice, each nut, each piece of bread, each tortilla, on a dry comal, in the right order, by smell. Move too fast and you scorch the cinnamon. Move too slowly and the seeds go bitter. The whole kitchen smells like a Oaxacan market by minute fifty.
Hours two and three are charring (the aromatics under the broiler, watching them blister) and rehydrating (the chillies in hot water, then drained and stem-removed).
Hour four is grinding. Traditionally, this happened on a metate — a flat volcanic stone, with a stone roller, the way the Aztec did it. Modern kitchens use a high-powered blender. We use a blender too, but in batches, and we still pulse rather than purée — texture matters.
Hours five through seven are simmering. The paste goes into a pot with hot lard, fries briefly until it darkens, then gets thinned with turkey stock and simmered. Stirring every twenty minutes. Adjusting the salt. Adding a piece of chocolate halfway through. Tasting; tasting again. The mole is ready when it coats the back of a spoon and tastes neither sweet nor sour nor bitter, but somewhere past all three.
"Mole is not a sauce. Mole is memory cooked into a pot."
How we serve it
Most mole poblano in Puebla is served over slow-braised turkey or chicken. We serve ours both ways. The chicken version is on the everyday menu — slow-braised thigh, mole ladled over generously, white rice on the side, warm corn tortillas to soak up what the rice leaves behind. The turkey version is on the holiday menu (Christmas, Día de los Muertos) when the kitchen has the bandwidth.
The right drink with mole is mezcal — specifically an espadín mezcal, served neat and small. The smoke in the mezcal meets the smoke in the chillies, and the chocolate gets a sharper edge against the agave. Tequila works too. Wine — heavy reds, low tannin — works better than most people expect.
Why most mole outside Mexico isn't great
The honest answer: because it's eight hours of work for one pot, and most kitchens can't justify that for a dish few customers order. So mole on most British menus is shortcut mole — pre-made paste from a jar, thinned with stock, simmered for an hour, served with chicken. It's not bad food. It's just not mole.
The shortcut paste loses two specific things: the toasting (which is half the flavour) and the freshness of the spices (which fade fast in a jar). What you get is something that tastes correctly chocolate-and-chilli, but flat — the layers are missing, the depth doesn't go anywhere. Once you've tasted properly built mole, the shortcut version is recognisable instantly.
We make a fresh batch every week. It takes a kitchen day. We portion it down and freeze what doesn't go out the same week — frozen mole reheats well, which is one of the things the recipe was designed for, in eras when families would make a vat in November and eat it through Christmas.
Try it before you commit to it
If you've never had mole, the kitchen will happily plate up a small tasting portion before you commit to a full plate. It's an unfamiliar flavour profile for many British palates — chocolate that is not sweet, chilli that is not hot in the obvious way, smoke that doesn't taste like barbecue — and not everyone falls for it on the first bite.
Most people who try a small spoon and a piece of tortilla end up ordering the full plate within five minutes. A few don't, and that's fine — there are four other things on the first-visit shortlist that work better for them. We'd rather you order the right dish than the difficult one.
Frequently asked questions
Is mole spicy?
Not in the obvious way. Mole poblano uses chillies for depth and complexity rather than heat — the dried chillies (mulato, ancho, pasilla) are mild-to-medium, and the long simmer rounds them off further. It tastes warmer than spicy. If you can eat a medium curry comfortably, you can eat our mole. We can also pull the chipotle (the smokiest, hottest of the five chillies) for an even milder version on request.
Is mole vegan or vegetarian?
Traditional mole poblano contains lard and is usually served with turkey or chicken, so the standard version is neither vegan nor vegetarian. We have a vegetarian version (made with vegetable shortening and served over baked enchiladas with cheese) on the menu year-round. A fully vegan version is available on request with two days' notice — the lard substitute changes the texture slightly, but the flavour holds.
How long does mole keep?
Properly made mole keeps very well. Refrigerated, the sauce holds for about a week (the flavour actually improves on day two or three as the components settle). Frozen, it keeps for three months without losing structure. This is one of the reasons the dish is traditional in Mexican households — a vat made in November feeds a family through Christmas.
Can I get mole as takeaway?
Yes. Our mole-with-chicken plate is on the takeaway menu and travels well. We package the mole separately from the chicken and tortillas to keep textures right — reheat the mole gently on the hob, plate over the warm chicken, eat with fresh tortillas. Same dish that leaves the kitchen.
Why do you only serve mole poblano and not the other moles?
We've experimented. Mole verde and mole rojo have both been on the menu at various points. The reason mole poblano stays is partly recipe (it's the one our chef knows best, from her family) and partly customer base — it's the recognisable mole for British diners, and selling two or three different moles every week was hard for the kitchen. Pop-ups occasionally feature alternative moles; ask the staff if you're curious.
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Frida Camden, 40 Camden High Street, London NW1 0JH. Between Mornington Crescent and Camden Town tube. Open Sun–Thu 10:30–22:00 (last food orders 21:30), Fri–Sat 10:00–23:00 (last food orders 22:30). Book a table online or call us on +44 207 383 3733.
