Mole Negro Croissant with Oaxacan Chocolate and Lard Lamination
Twenty-eight ingredients of a Oaxacan black mole reduced to a paste, folded into a croissant laminated with pork lard instead of butter, and glazed with bitter chocolate. Our world kitchen's most ambitious pastry, and the one that made a Oaxacan grandmother laugh and ask for a second.
- 500 g strong white flour
- 10 g salt
- 50 g sugar
- 10 g instant yeast
- 280 ml cold milk
- 210 g pork lard, chilled
- 90 g butter
- 120 g mole negro paste
- 1 tablespoon lard for the mole
- 100 g Oaxacan chocolate, chopped
- 1 egg, beaten
- Make a dough with the flour, salt, sugar, yeast and milk. Knead 5 minutes and chill 1 hour.
- Cook the mole paste with a tablespoon of lard over low heat until very thick. Cool completely.
- Beat the lard and butter together, shape into a 20 cm square and chill until firm but pliable.
- Roll the dough to 20 by 40 cm. Spread the cold mole paste thinly over the whole surface. Place the fat block on one half, fold, seal.
- Laminate with three single folds, chilling 40 minutes between each. Roll to 4 mm, cut triangles, roll into croissants.
- Prove at 22 C for 2 hours. Glaze with egg and bake at 200 C for 18 to 20 minutes. Melt the chocolate and brush over the warm croissants.
Mole negro is the most complex sauce in the Americas: dried chilhuacle and pasilla chillies, charred tortillas, burnt chilli seeds, plantain, raisins, almonds, sesame, spices, and Oaxacan chocolate, ground and cooked for hours into something black, smoky, sweet and bitter. It is served over turkey at weddings. Our kitchen wanted to know whether the flavour of a mole could travel into a completely different form: a laminated pastry, the most French object there is.
The answer took eleven attempts. Mole as a liquid sauce cannot be laminated; it soaks the dough. Reduced to a thick paste, cooled and spread thin on the dough before the fat block is folded in, it survives the lamination as a dark, fragrant seam between the layers. The fat is pork lard, which is what Oaxacan bakers use for their pan de yema, blended with a little butter for plasticity. The finished croissant is mahogany brown, smells of chilli and chocolate, tastes of smoke and sesame and a slow heat, and is glazed with melted Oaxacan drinking chocolate that sets to a thin, bitter shell.
How the mole is made pastry-safe
A traditional mole negro paste, homemade or bought from a good Oaxacan producer, is cooked down in a pan with a spoon of lard until it is thick enough to hold a line drawn through it, then spread to 2 millimetres on the rolled dough and chilled hard. The paste must be completely cold and the dough well floured; the sesame and almond in the mole give the layers a faint crunch.
Eating it
Warm, split, with a cup of Oaxacan hot chocolate for breakfast, or filled with shredded turkey and pickled red onion for lunch, which closes the circle with the wedding table it came from. It keeps a day, and toasts well on the second.