EatMx: Real Mexican food, at home and on the road

A Really Unusual Shrimp Mole

You've never tasted a mole like this one, made with shrimp. It's original and creative but based on classic mole ingredients, with a few tweaks.

The recipe is in "Pescan: A Feel Good Cookbook" by Abbie Cornish (at right) and Jacqueline King Schiller. 

Cornish and Schiller are best friends who cook together. Cornish is an actress. Schiller, a model, has the blog The Feel Good Kitchen. She's the chef, and Cornish is the artist, stylist and recipe tester. Together they've produced a beautiful book with fresh, delicious, easy-to-make food. 

Schiller's grandfather came from Oaxaca, so she's rooted in Mexican tradition, and the mole is her recipe.

The surprise ingredient is tahini. You've eaten mole sprinkled with sesame seeds, so this makes sense, because tahini is sesame seed paste. It's "an easy way to add a lot of sesame flavor," Schiller said.

Chocolate is often in mole too. Schiller's variation is to add cacao powder and cacao nibs. Instead of dried chiles, she puts in chili powder, a jalapeño and a dash of cayenne. 

Mole sauces are complex, with long lists of ingredients. "I tried to come up with something that was equally complex and flavorful, but a little more practical," she said. Here is how the mole appears in the book.  

Most often, chicken comes with mole sauce, but this book shuns meat, poultry, dairy and refined sugar. If a recipe isn't gluten-free, ways to make it so are suggested. Fish and shrimp are included because they provide important nutrients. 

Cornish and Schiller adopted this sort of diet to improve their own health, and they've added comments about feel good ingredients and nutritional pointers to the recipes. 

What to serve with the mole? Schiller's Fiesta Black Beans, from her Mexican-American family.

And Fiesta Veggie Rice, which contains cumin and Mexican oregano.

Both were in the lunch lineup when the authors presented their book at Melissa's Produce. 

This is how the shrimp, beans and rice would look on a plate for dinner. With them is a quinoa salad with kale sprouts, radicchio, watermelon radish and dried cranberries, another recipe from the book. 

The mole is versatile. The same sauce can go with baked tofu, roasted carrots or fried eggs, the authors suggest in the book, so vegetarians can enjoy it too.

SHRIMP WITH MOLE SAUCE
From "Pescan: A Feel Good Cookbook"

For the mole:
1/2 cup raisins
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 jalapeño chile, trimmed, halved, and seeded
2 garlic cloves, peeled
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1 cup vegetable broth
3 tomatillos, husked, rinsed, and roughly chopped
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
3 tablespoons cacao nibs
2 tablespoons cacao powder
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon smoked salt
1 teaspoon kosher sea salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground anise seed (can substitute fennel seed)
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup warm filtered water
Sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds for garnish

Shrimp
1/2 lime
1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion
Kosher sea salt and black pepper
1 1/4 pounds large shrimp, peeled and deveined
3 tablespoons olive oil or melted refined coconut oil
1/4 cup cilantro leaves and tender stems for garnish

To make the mole, in a small bowl cover the raisins with warm water and set aside.

Heat the oil in a large sauté pan over medium-low heat. Add the onion, jalapeño and garlic and stir to coat with the oil. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 to 20 minutes, until softened and browned. If they begin to blacken, lower the heat to low. It's OK if there is a bit of charring.

Meanwhile, in a blender, combine the tomatoes, broth, tomatillos, tahini, pumpkin seeds, cacao nibs, cacao powder, chili powder, smoked salt, kosher sea salt, black pepper, cinnamon, anise seed, cumin, oregano and cayenne. 

Drain the raisins and add them to the blender. Then add the softened onion, garlic, jalapeño and the water. Blend, starting on low and bringing up to high speed, until smooth. You may need to scrape down the sides once or twice as you blend.

If you are not using a high-speed blender, you may need to add a splash more broth. Pour the mole into the sauté pan and warm over low heat, stirring occasionally, while you prepare the shrimp, up to 20 minutes.

To prepare the shrimp, in a small bowl, squeeze the juice from the lime over the onion. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt and pepper and toss. Set aside.

Heat a grill or grill pan to medium-high heat. In a large bowl, toss the shrimp with the oil and season with salt an pepper. Add 1/2 cup of the mole sauce and toss. Grill the shrimp until light grill marks appear and the shrimp is just opaque all the way through, 1 to 2 minutes per side.

To serve, pour 1/3 cup of the mole sauce onto the middle of each serving plate. Spread the mole into a circle with the bottom of the measuring cup. Divide the shrimp among the plates. Lightly sprinkle with sesame and pumpkin seeds, about 1/2 teaspoon each per plate. Top with the sliced onion and a scattering of cilantro. Serve immediately.

Makes 4 servings as an entree or 6 as an appetizer

The Season's Best Pan de Muerto

Pan de muerto--bread of the dead--is heavenly, the way Alex Peña makes it.

Decorated with skulls and bones and sprinkled with sugar, it has the most divine texture of any bread I've tasted, like cake and bread combined. 

Peña (above right) was making it for the YouTube show Trippy Food (www.YouTube.com/TrippyFood), an episode you can see November 1. At left is show host Valentino Herrera.  

Pan de Muerto is the bread that goes on the ofrendas (altars) set up for the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). On November 1, children who have passed away are honored. November 2 is for adults. The bread and other treats they loved in life are set out on the altar so they can "taste" them again when they return home for a brief visit. 


At this time of year, all panaderías and Latino markets offer pan de muerto. Above is a supermarket loaf. Peña's bread isn't in retail outlets, but you can see how it's made on Trippy Food and imagine the dreamy taste.

Once, Peña made Mexican breads for his family's bakery, La Morenita in Cypress Park, which is now closed. They were the best I ever tasted. Now he's director of product development for Bellarise, a company that supplies yeast and other ingredients for industrial baking. Bellarise is part of Pak Group, the fourth largest yeast company in the world.  

But Mexican bread remains Peña's passion, and the other night the lab where he works was filled with the sweet scent of freshly baked pan de muerto. The bread dates from the 1940s, created by Basque bakers who settled in Mexico City, he said. 


A unique flavoring employed by the Basques was orange flower water. The taste of this in the bread is so subtle you hardly know it's there. Here, Peña sniffs a slice. 

The other ingredients in his pan de muerto are yeast, flour, butter, lard, eggs, water, cane sugar and salt. Some recipes use cinnamon instead of orange flower water, but Peña says this slows fermentation, and he doesn't use it.

After mixing the dough, he forms it into rounds and refrigerates them to ferment. The slow fermentation adds flavor and improves the texture, he said.  

Large rounds of dough represent tumbas (tombs). To make bones, Peña rolls small balls of dough into knobby strips and drapes these over the top of the tumbas. Other balls of dough represent skulls

Here is a completed loaf ready to go into the proof box, where it will develop for 45 minutes to an hour. The bread then bakes for 25 minutes in the lab's revolving oven.  

Peña paints the freshly baked golden brown breads with melted butter.

Then he coats them with sugar. The custom is to use pink sugar for children and white sugar for adults, he said.

The way the breads are decorated varies from region to region in Mexico. Peña sprinkles some of the loaves with sesame seeds instead of sugar.

After baking, he lets the bread cool just long enough to slice and enjoy. 

Talk about melt in your mouth, I've never tasted bread like this. It's truly a gift from Paradise.