PUEBLA is a two-hour drive southeast of Mexico City, past the sugarcane farms and cactus rows, and out onto a long stretch of highway. The Crayola colors of Mexico’s heartland in autumn are so bright you need sunglasses, but it’s tempting to peel them off to soak in the russet-red gravel and bright green squares of pasture, set against a high-altitude sky.
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Taylor Umlauf
The mole sampler at Mesón Sacristía de la Compañía in Puebla.
Taylor Umlauf
Puebla is a city known for its Baroque churches with indigenous elements.
Cutting through a drab, industrial outskirt, my driver reaches Puebla’s historical district as the sun drifts below the buildings, the evening skyline of Baroque domes lighted in gold. We wind along the cobbled streets, the centuries-old churches rising up on either side. Until the car stops suddenly outside the hotel, I’m speechless.
I mean, I’m here to throw down some good mole sauce. No one mentioned the place looked like Rome.
Go looking for a good mole, and sooner or later a Mexican sends you to Puebla. Though not as popular with American foodies as Oaxaca, Puebla is considered by many to be the gastronomic capital of Mexico. And its most famous culinary creation is mole poblano — that complex brown chili sauce, traditionally served over poultry, that involves dozens of ingredients and carries hints of its unsweetened chocolate.
When most Americans hear the word mole (pronounced MOH-lay), they often think specifically of mole poblano, but there are several types of moles, in a variety of colors and flavors — and not all of them include chocolate.
I had just witnessed this diversity firsthand at the annual October Mole Festival in San Pedro Atocpan, a tiny farming town on the outskirts of Mexico City. In the kiosks there, women slapped at big balls of dough, shaping fresh tortillas to scoop up mole from steaming pots. Local suppliers waved their hands magicianlike over fat slabs of mole paste — varying shades of rich brown mole poblanos; bright green cilantro-infused mole verdes; orangey-red pipián moles made with pumpkin seeds; peanut-butterlike cacahuate moles; and mole almendrado, a dark almond mole that’s the local pride of San Pedro Atocpan.
For years, mole was a special-occasion dish only, the preparation notoriously time-consuming. But all of these powders and pastes were ready to roll — add a dash of oil and chicken broth, and you’ve got a delicious mole in minutes. This was good news for hardworking homemakers, but I wanted to get back to the beginning of mole. I needed to find Puebla.
To say that there is competition in Puebla over where to eat your mole poblano is an understatement. Almost every restaurant in town promotes the dish, and many hosts stand outside beckoning to passers-by. Signs everywhere shout “Típico!” — a reassurance to customers that yes — yes — here, you will find the authentic food of Puebla. But many Poblanos still cook the best moles at home, and it can be difficult to find a great one among the masses.
WHEN you do, though, prepare to be dazzled. At the Mesón Sacristía de Compañía, a boutique hotel-restaurant in a 250-year-old building with a noted chef, Alonso Hernández, a mole sampler included by far the best mole poblano I tasted. But it was the Sacristía mole, a smoky house recipe passed down from the owner Leobardo Espinosa’s grandmother, that sent me. Nodding, Mr. Espinosa said, “If the sauce is not good, the plate is not good.”
The comida, or lunch, is still the biggest meal of the day here. As night falls, the Poblanos zip up their sweaters and head down to the main square, bright with twinkling lights and lined with Parisian-style cafes. On a Saturday night, there was a live pop concert on one side of the square: on another, a handful of locals stared transfixed at a glowing television playing a Michael Jackson concert, a little girl tugging at her sister to dance. At nearby 3 Oriente, hipsters lounged at Las Brujas cafe — students, perhaps, from the university next door. In the Barrio del Artista, young men smoked cigarettes and listened to two men play double basses, like something out of an old Beat flick.
Let yourself be directed by the friendly Poblanos, and you open yourself up to a city teeming with fantastic regional food. Behind each specialty is a nugget of history: the greasy, yet superb, chalupas began here, but Puebla’s version, fried tortillas with sauce and shredded meat, bears little resemblance to its Taco Bell namesake. When Puebla was a smaller town, Mr. Espinosa explained, people would serve them out of their garages so workers could eat standing up.
On “Sweet Street,” tourists pick up sacks of the addictive Tortitas de Santa Clara, pumpkin seed cookies created in a local convent. The nuns also get credit for the seasonal Chiles en Nogada, a long chile poblano pepper stuffed with meat and fruit, covered in a sweet, creamy walnut sauce and pocked with ripe pomegranate seeds. At Tacos Tony, they slice the pork off an upright rotisserie, shawarma-style, wrap it in a flour shell and thump it with a shot of gine sauce (think tahini). They’re making tacos arabe, begun by the city’s large Lebanese community.
Puebla is a surprising blend of cultures, beginning with the old Spanish-Indian divide, which shows up periodically in the local art and cuisine. At La Capilla del Rosario, a chapel tucked inside the Santo Domingo Church, I met Antonio Quiroz, an art history major at a nearby university. Pointing to the black curls of a carved angel, notably different from the blond, blue-eyed angels of Spanish art, he explained that the Indians forced to build these churches had no idea what angels looked like. “The Spaniards told the Indians that angels looked like babies,” he said. “And the Indians, of course, had never seen a blond baby.”
Mole itself is evidence that the Indian culture was never defeated. Though the invention of mole poblano is usually attributed to a Spanish nun, the word itself comes from the Náhuatl Indian word molli, meaning “concoction” or “sauce.” And most food scholars agree that some form of the sauce dates back to pre-Hispanic times.
If the city is a blend of ethnicities, it’s just as often a mixture of Old World and New. Behind a tarp at Los Sapos market, two women labored over boiling pots of mole poblano. They were making huazontle, a green plant stuffed with cheese and fried, then smothered in mole. It was a scene from the past, but Van Halen’s “Jump” played surreally in the background.
Having eaten my way through Puebla, I decided it was high time to terrify the natives by attempting to cook a mole myself. I sat in on a cooking class with Mr. Hernández, the chef from the Mesón, where he walked me and two other students through a few recipes, including the Sacristía mole I’d liked so much.
As with most good moles, the heart of the Sacristía mole is the chili. This time, the star is the chile mecos, a dried, smoked chipotle fried in oil until it puffs, then blended into the sauce. Few chefs hand-mash their moles anymore, but most have a method to their blending. “You march up from 4 to 10,” Leslie Mackenzie, a fellow student, explained, punching the buttons on the blender in three-second intervals, “and then you march down.”
This was the fifth class for Leslie and Moe Elliott, two American friends who discovered the cooking-class package on the Internet. In between instructions, everyone swapped jokes and talked mole. When the chef whipped out his beloved comal, a flat pan used to sear vegetables, Moe yelled “Nunca, nunca, nunca!” (meaning “never”) — apparently, one should never use oil on a seasoned comal.
There are a few legends detailing the origins of mole poblano, but Mr. Hernández spun out the most popular — a mid-17th-century nun, Sor Andrea de la Asunción of the Santa Rosa Convent, was asked to create a special dish for a visiting archbishop. After class, I walked over to the enormous Talavera-tiled kitchen where it all went down and tried to imagine the beautiful chaos that must have ensued.
BUT here’s the burning question. If a mole can be any number of different sauces, what differentiates it from, well, sauce? As the chef Zarela Martínez, of the New York City restaurant Zarela, defined it: “A mole is a puréed main-dish sauce with chilies, either fresh or dried, and other ingredients, such as fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, with a thickener. This could be seeds, nuts, bread, masa, corn tortillas or a combination of the above.”
On my last day, I wandered over to the Mercado el Carmen, a market where many locals shop for their mole ingredients, and supposedly home to the best cemita — Puebla’s alternative to the Mexican torta — in town. Making my way past the chilies and pomegranate seeds, I found a rambunctious assembly line forming the cemitas — piled high with avocado, cheese, Milanese-style fried beef and peppers soaked in chipotle juice. I ordered one of the enormous sandwiches, easily the size of two Big Mac’s, and they double-bagged it for security.
Sitting down by the window, I took a bite and was floored. The sandwich was unbelievably good — bursting with fresh ingredients, the cool avocado offsetting the spicy vegetables. I worked through half of it and paused, unsure how much I had left in me. Next to me, a family was unwrapping four of their own, and I leaned in to ask them in broken Spanglish: “Es típico to finito el cemita uno persona?” (“Is typical to finite the cemita one person?”)
“Sí, sí,” they said, nodding and laughing.
Now, if only I had some mole for this thing.
A Nun Wanted a Dish Fit for an Archbishop
THE city of Puebla, capital of the state of Puebla, is about 60 miles southeast of Mexico City. Puebla’s historical district was named a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1987. On Dec. 8, AeroMexico (800-237-6639; www.aeromexico.com) will begin three-times-a-week nonstop flights from New York to Puebla, starting at about $550.
The restaurant at the Mesón Sacristía de la Compañía (6 sur No. 304 Callejón de los Sapos; 52-222-232-4513; www.mexicoboutiquehotels.com) offers cooking class packages (www.epiculinary.com) with its sister hotel, the Mesón Sacristía de Capuchinas. Non-guests can sit in on a class for $65 a day.
The Camino Real Puebla (7 Poniente 105; 800-722-6466; www.caminoreal.com) hotel is a beautifully restored 16th-century convent of La Concepción whose 84 rooms are each uniquely decorated. The hotel’s lavish brunch spread is a local favorite. Rates begin at $135 a night, but there are special weekly rates.
The State of Puebla’s Secretary of Tourism Office offers private English-language tours of the historical district for about 200 pesos (about $18 at 11 pesos to the U.S. dollar) a person (5 Oriente No. 3; 52-222-777-1519; www.puebla.gob.mx).
The museum of the Centro Cultural Santa Rosa (3 Norte No. 1203; 52-222-232-7792) contains the kitchen where some say mole sauce began.
Cemitas las Poblanitas at the Mercado el Carmen (2 Sur y 21 Oriente) serves a terrific cemita. Head into the main entrance and take a right at the first aisle. The stall is all the way down on the right, across from the cow tongue butcher. Welcome to Mexico.
