Mole Poblano

Mole poblano is chicken simmered in a dark sauce of dried chiles, chocolate and ground spices. It's Puebla's signature mole, and the most famous version of a sauce family that can run to twenty or more ingredients — the popular convent-kitchen origin story has nuns improvising it for a visiting archbishop with whatever they had on hand.

What it actually is

Several kinds of dried chile are toasted, soaked and blended into a paste along with toasted sesame seeds, nuts, raisins, spices and a small amount of dark chocolate, which rounds out the bitterness of the chiles rather than making the sauce sweet. The paste is fried and thinned with broth into a thick, dark, glossy sauce, and chicken — traditionally simmered whole or in pieces — is cooked in it until it's fully infused with the sauce's flavour.

The chocolate is often mistaken for the whole point of the dish by people who haven't had it; it's a small, supporting amount, not a chocolate sauce with chicken added to it.

How it's served

• Chicken pieces under a generous pour of sauce, sesame seeds scattered over the top.
• With rice and warm tortillas, for scooping up the sauce.
• At celebrations, since the sauce's long preparation makes it a special-occasion dish more than a weekday one.

Writing it on a menu

• Flag sesame and peanuts; both are common components of the sauce paste and easy to miss under "mole sauce" on a menu.
• Mention that the sauce takes real time to make, often a full day between toasting, soaking and blending components, which is part of the value guests are paying for.
• Note that chocolate is a small supporting ingredient, not a dominant flavour; setting that expectation avoids disappointment.
• Say if you make your mole fresh in-house, since a genuine long-simmered mole is a real point of craft worth naming.