Mexico and Latin America.
Mole poblano can contain twenty ingredients and four or five kinds of dried chilli, yet it is barely hot. The chillies are there for flavour: fruity ancho, tangy guajillo, smoky pasilla.
Mexico's staple is corn, cooked with lime (nixtamal, XXI.9) and ground to masa for tortillas, tamales and much else; beans, squash and chillies complete the ancient milpa, and tomatoes, tomatillos, avocados, cacao and vanilla all come from Mexico and Central America. Chillies are the soul of the cuisine. Fresh ones — jalapeño, serrano, poblano, habanero — go into salsas and dishes; dried ones change name and character: dried poblano is ancho (fruity, raisiny, mild), dried mirasol guajillo (bright, tangy), dried chilaca pasilla (dark, herbal), smoked dried jalapeño chipotle; árbol is small and fierce. Heat comes from capsaicin, measured in Scoville units (XI.7).
Dried chillies are wiped, stemmed and seeded, toasted briefly on a hot comal until they blister and smell fragrant — seconds, not minutes, or they turn bitter (VIII.8) — then soaked in hot water and blended into sauces. Moles combine them with toasted nuts and seeds (sesame, peanuts, almonds, pumpkin seeds), spices, dried fruit, tortilla or bread for body and sometimes chocolate, fried in lard until thick and dark. Across Latin America the same New World ingredients take other forms: Peru's ceviche of fish "cooked" in lime juice with ají (XIX.6), Brazil's feijoada of black beans and pork, Argentina's asado over wood embers. The workshop blends a chilli sauce.
Below: the heat of a sauce made with the dried chilli you choose at the grams per kilogram of sauce you choose (Scoville heat of the chilli, mid-range of published values, diluted by mass), against the heat of familiar sauces and fresh chillies.
- Know Mexico's staples and dried chillies.
- Toast and soak dried chillies.
- Estimate a sauce's heat.
- Recognise Latin American dishes from the same ingredients.
Choose chillies for flavour, count them for heat
A sauce with 60 g of ancho per kilogram — a generous mole — comes to about 90 Scoville units: mild, all fruit and depth. Ten grams of árbol in the same kilogram gives about 250, a clear heat; ten grams of habanero about 2,500, as hot as Tabasco. That is how Mexican cooks layer flavour and heat separately: mild, large chillies for body, a few small fierce ones for fire.
A simple red chilli sauce (for enchiladas, about 750 mL): wipe and stem 4 ancho and 4 guajillo chillies, shake out the seeds; toast them on a hot dry pan 10–20 seconds a side until fragrant and pliable, not black; soak in boiling water 20 minutes. Blend with 2 garlic cloves, ½ onion, a pinch of cumin and oregano, salt and 300 mL of the soaking water (taste it first — if bitter, use fresh water) until smooth; strain. Fry in 2 tbsp lard or oil in a deep pan, stirring, 10 minutes until it darkens and thickens; thin with stock. Wear gloves for hot chillies and keep hands from your eyes; capsaicin dissolves in fat, not water (XI.7).
Toast one dried chilli for 15 seconds and another for a minute. Soak both and taste a piece of each.
Terms
- Nixtamal / masa
- Corn cooked with lime, and the dough ground from it.
- Ancho / guajillo / pasilla
- Dried chillies: fruity / tangy / dark.
- Mole
- A complex sauce of chillies, nuts, seeds, spices and fruit.
- Comal
- A flat griddle for tortillas and toasting.
Sources
- Scoville heat of chillies (published ranges): bell pepper 0, jalapeño 2 500–8 000, cayenne 30 000–50 000, Thai bird's eye 50 000–100 000, habanero 100 000–350 000 SHU; pure capsaicin about 16 000 000 SHU.
- One part per million of capsaicin corresponds to about 16 Scoville heat units (the conversion used with HPLC measurements, ASTA method 21.3).
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.