Hole Mole – Tasting and Testing New Products

August 17, 2010

Today, we are shooting for our Winter Spring catalog  – so the heat outside doesn’t match the food on the table.  My last two weeks have been spent finalizing some of the products for this shoot – and we’ve had a blast!  A troop of us went way out in Texas to the test kitchens and ate all afternoon.  It’s the one place where all tastes and opinions are created equal.

We ate salad, slow cooked meals, barbeque brisket and preserves – then we had lunch and dinner!  It’s amazing what you can learn about someone when you talk about food.  You learn about their family life as a child, their ethnic heritage by what’s on the table… but the hot discussion of the day was Mexican!

I have come to the firm belief that great Mexican food is that with which you grew up.  I’m from Los Angeles and the formulating chef in this case was from Texas.  You would have thought it was the Mexican American war all over again.  We had two distinct and vehement points of view on what constituted an “authentic” product – mole in particular.

The word mole comes from the Aztec meaning stew or sauce. In Mexico, mole recipes are passed down from generation to generation, and are as individual as your family. It’s a closely guarded secret.  Mole is a rich thick sauce, made from a variety of chiles, onions, garlic, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, nuts and chocolate.  

And that’s where the disagreement started – the Texans didn’t want chocolate!  Where I am from, without chocolate there is no mole.  Then there was the discussion about chicken vs. beef.

So we compromised – we sent both up to our research panel at our facility in Chicago and are having our target audience vote!  May the best Mexican win.

In the mean time, if you want to try mole easily, go to a restaurant, wait for us, or if you have what can be a considerable amount of time you can try:

1. Steak Mole with Cilantro

2.  Chicken Mole

3. Pinto Bean Mole Chili

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Filed under: Cooking Tips, Foreign Influence

Tags: chili recipes, crock pot recipes, Mexican food, Mexican recipes, mole recipes, slow cooker recipes