Mole Poblano with Turkey (Mole Poblano de Guajolote)

// SUPPLY LIST

// OPERATIONS

1. 1 Joint the turkey into 12 serving pieces and put them in a 10-12 litre stockpot with 4.5 litres cold water, the halved onion, the 6 peeled garlic cloves and 1 tbsp of the salt. Bring to a bare simmer over medium heat and skim the grey foam for the first 10 minutes, then hold it at 90-95°C (194-203°F), partly covered, for 75-90 minutes, until a skewer enters the thickest part of a thigh with only slight resistance — it finishes cooking in the mole, so stop short of falling apart. Never let it boil hard: it clouds the broth and turns the leg meat stringy. Lift the turkey onto a tray, strain the broth — you want about 3.6 litres, so top up with hot water if you are short — and keep both warm.
2. 2 Wearing gloves, work through all four kinds of chilli: pull off the stems, slit them open, shake out the seeds and tear out the pale veins. Reserve 2 tbsp of the mulato and ancho seeds and discard the rest along with all the veins — the veins carry raw heat and a papery bitterness that has no place here. Heat a comal or heavy cast-iron skillet over medium (surface around 175°C/350°F) and press the chillies flat with a spatula, skin side down, for only 15-20 seconds a side, until they go limp and supple and smell of raisins and tobacco. You are warming them pliable here, not colouring them — they take their real colour in the lard two steps on, and a chilli that is toasted hard now and fried later has been cooked twice. Any chilli that blackens or gives off acrid smoke goes straight in the bin: one scorched chilli will make five litres of mole permanently bitter and nothing added later will hide it.
3. 3 In the same dry pan over medium heat, toast the 2 tbsp reserved chilli seeds, stirring, for 2-3 minutes until deep coffee-brown and just beginning to smoke — this measured bitterness is traditional and is what stops the finished mole tasting like sweet gravy, but take them to brown, not black. Tip them out, then toast the 70 g of sesame seeds for the mole for 3-4 minutes, stirring constantly, until they hop in the pan and turn pale gold, and tip those out too. Toast the remaining 20 g of sesame the same way and set it aside separately for the garnish, or it will end up in the grinder with everything else and you will have nothing to finish the plates with. Finally toast the canela, cloves, peppercorns and aniseed together for 30-45 seconds, until the aniseed smells sweet and the canela is fragrant; keep all four lots apart.
4. 4 In a deep 28 cm skillet, melt 250 g of the lard and bring it to 175°C/350°F (a scrap of tortilla should bubble briskly on contact). Fry the chillies in four or five small batches for 10-15 seconds a side, until they puff slightly, turn glossy and the fat smells sweet, lifting them out with a slotted spoon into a large bowl. Let the fat come back to temperature between batches: crowd the pan and the chillies stew in cooling grease instead of puffing, and they will taste flat and greasy in the finished sauce. Pour 1.5 litres of just-boiled water over them, weight them under a plate and soak for 30 minutes until completely limp. Drain and discard the soaking water — it is where the bitterness collects; you will grind the chillies with broth instead.
5. 5 Working in the same lard, still at 175°C/350°F, fry the remaining solids one kind at a time and keep the piles separate, watching each closely because the timings are nothing alike: almonds for 3-4 minutes until golden all the way through when you split one; peanuts and pecans for 60-90 seconds until they colour at the edges; raisins for 10-15 seconds, just until they puff, since any longer and they turn to bitter grit; bread slices for about 1 minute a side until deep gold; tortilla pieces for 30-45 seconds until rigid and crisp. The bread and nuts drink fat greedily, so top the pan up from the remaining lard whenever the level drops below about 5 mm, or the last batches will scorch on a dry pan. Drain everything on kitchen paper and strain the leftover lard into a jug — expect 120-150 g back, and make it up with fresh lard if you have less, because you need a full measure to fry the paste.
6. 6 Wipe the comal, set it over medium-high heat (surface around 220°C/430°F) and char the tomatoes, tomatillos, the quartered onion and the 8 unpeeled garlic cloves, turning them, for 8-12 minutes. The tomatoes and tomatillos should be blistered black in patches and collapsing, the onion streaked dark and softened at the edge, the garlic soft inside its blackened skin. Pull the garlic off early if it starts to smell acrid rather than sweet — burnt garlic is the one charred flavour the mole will not absorb. Slip the garlic out of its skins and discard the skins; keep every drop of tomato and tomatillo juice.
7. 7 Grind in two separate lots in a blender, using warm turkey broth as the only liquid and never filling the jug more than two-thirds. First the drained chillies with 700 ml of the broth, in two or three batches, each blended on high for a full 3-4 minutes until there is no speck of skin left — rehydrated chillies are bulky and a jug run too dry will simply seize around the blades, so add broth until the vortex moves freely. Then everything else — nuts, raisins, fried bread and tortilla, charred vegetables and garlic, the 70 g toasted sesame, the toasted chilli seeds and the spices — with another 500 ml broth, blended 2-3 minutes. A metate is the traditional tool and gives a finer paste, but the blender is what every home kitchen in Puebla uses now and is perfectly accepted. What is not optional is the sieve: push both purees through a medium-mesh sieve with a ladle, and discard the 200-300 ml of gritty skin and husk left behind, or the finished mole will feel sandy on the tongue.
8. 8 Choose a 10-12 litre cazuela or heavy enamelled stockpot — you need the headroom for the turkey later and for the spitting now — and heat the reserved strained lard plus enough fresh lard to make about 250 g over medium-high until it shimmers, around 180°C (356°F). Tip in both purees at once, standing well back and holding the lid up as a shield: it spits like water hitting hot fat for the first 30 seconds. Fry hard, stirring constantly with a flat-ended wooden spoon and scraping the base, for 15-20 minutes, until the colour deepens from brick red to dark mahogany, the paste holds a furrow when the spoon passes through, and beads of red-orange fat rise at the edges. Do not cut this step short to save time: unfried paste tastes raw and sharp, and no amount of later simmering will season it.
9. 9 Whisk in 1.8 litres of the warm turkey broth a ladleful at a time, letting each addition go smooth before the next, then bring the pot to the barest simmer — 90-95°C (194-203°F), one lazy blip every couple of seconds — and cook uncovered for 90-120 minutes, until it has reduced by roughly a fifth and tastes rounded rather than raw. Stir right into the corners of the base every 10 minutes with the flat wooden spoon: starch from the bread and tortilla and fat from the nuts settle out as it thickens, and the mole will catch and scorch without any warning. If you ever smell burning, do not stir it in; decant the good mole into a clean pot immediately, leaving the scorched layer behind.
10. 10 Now stir in the chopped chocolate and the piloncillo, let them melt completely, and simmer very gently for a further 20-30 minutes to take the raw edge off the sugar — put in any earlier they would sit on the base through the long simmer and burn. Season with about 3 tsp salt, added a teaspoon at a time and tasted between each. It should read smoky and dark-fruited first, with sweetness only arriving at the very end; if it tastes sharp or thin, add piloncillo 10 g at a time, and if it tastes flat and muddy it is almost always salt it needs, not sugar. The consistency is right when it coats the back of a spoon like double cream and a slick of red fat sits on the surface — loosen with hot broth if it is claggy, or simmer on a few minutes more if it is loose.
11. 11 Slide the turkey pieces into the mole in a single layer, spoon the sauce over to cover them and simmer very gently, uncovered, at 85-90°C (185-194°F) for 25-30 minutes, until the meat is hot to the bone and a skewer meets no resistance at the thigh joint. Baste two or three times so the pieces take on the sauce; do not stir vigorously or let it come to a proper boil, or the pieces will break up and shed skin and bone-grit into the mole.
12. 12 Take the pot off the heat and rest, covered, for 30 minutes before serving so the fat re-emulsifies and the spices settle — or, better, cool it and refrigerate overnight and reheat gently the next day over low heat with a splash of the reserved broth, which is how it is served at Puebla weddings and is unarguably the better mole. Serve each piece of turkey napped with a generous ladle of mole, scattered with the reserved 20 g of toasted sesame seeds, alongside plain white rice or arroz rojo and a stack of hot corn tortillas for pushing the sauce around the plate. Nothing else is needed on the table.

// CLASSIFICATIONS