Chocolate Actually Isn't The Main Ingredient Of Mole Sauce

If you've heard that Mexican mole sauce is made from a surprisingly sweet ingredient — chocolate — well, you've unfortunately heard wrong. Sort of. While chocolate can be an ingredient in mole, there's actually a variety of mole sauces. The state of Oaxaca alone has at least seven types of mole sauces, but there are many other variations too. Even of those seven, some are made with chocolate and some without. Mole isn't one catch-all sauce that represents all of Mexican cuisine either — it's actually quite regional, hailing from the Puebla and Oaxaca states south of Mexico City. It's also worth noting that the term mole comes from an Aztec word for sauce, so the word also pops up in terms like guacamole, meaning avocado sauce. 

If there's one common ingredient across different types of mole, it's not chocolate, but chiles. However, there's no singular chile that appears in every mole: The sauces use different types of spicy hot peppers, and they also vary between fresh and dried forms. If you're working with dried chiles, they'll generally need to be soaked in water in order to rehydrate them before incorporating into the recipe. Some common chiles you'll find in different moles include guajillo, árbol, serrano, ancho (which is not the same chile pepper as pasilla), and chipotle.

Perhaps the reason some people assume mole always contains chocolate is because of the type you'll usually find on menus in the U.S. — mole negro. This dark-colored sauce is often served over chicken, and features unsweetened dark chocolate as part of the recipe, alongside a bunch of spices like cinnamon, cloves, cumin, and allspice. It also gets some extra sweetness from raisins.

Another version popular in the States is mole poblano or red mole, which is sometimes called Mexico's national dish. It also features chocolate, as well as nuts, raisins, and plenty of chiles and spices. Then there's mole coloradito, one more notable chocolatey mole (although it might only use a couple of ounces in the entire sauce). It follows a similar sweet-and-spicy path to mole poblano but uses mashed plantains (not bananas) for thickening.

There are some other common mole recipes that don't use chocolate, though. For example, there's mole verde, which centers around tomatillos, pumpkin seeds, jalapeños, and herbs like epazote. Mole amarillo (yellow mole sauce) also ditches chocolate along with dried fruits, sticking to chiles, spices, and corn flour (masa harina) for thickening. There's sweet-and-spicy mole manchamantel too, which means tablecloth stainer. Some similar spices like cinnamon and cloves appear here, but it uses greasy chorizo and gets its sweet kick from pineapple instead of chocolate.