My favorite time of day in Mexico City is the early morning. It’s cool, quiet, and the parks are almost empty, a great place to sit down and have a cup of coffee with a blue corn tlacoyo with beans and cheese. Another thing I love about Mexico City as well as Oaxaca are the secret spaces. A non-descript streetfront door opens into a massive warehouse space with 30-foot-high ceilings or a cobblestone patio with ancient spreading trees. One such place is Jorge Fritz and Beto Estúa’scooking school, Casa Jacaranda, which, on a cool morning in January, I visited to get a lesson in making encacahuatado from chef Emilio Perez, a sauce that, in my book, is a mole with spices, peanuts, chiles and the usual foundation of tomato, onion, and garlic.

If you spend enough time in Mexico, you become familiar with a few basic culinary concepts. The first one is charring tomato, onion and garlic and using that as the base for a sauce. The second is making a broth with water and meat; Mexican cuisine rarely calls for store-bought broths. Third, chiles and nuts are usually toasted to enhance flavor. Fourth, a blender is the key appliance whether you are making a salsa, a soup, or even a cake.

Here’s the basic approach. Cook the chicken in water. (This results in a broth which will be used in the sauce.) Broil or otherwise char the tomatoes, onion and garlic; Emilio used a comal. Chiles are toasted in a saucepan and then added to the blender with the broth to soften. Peanuts, sesame seeds and spices (cinnamon, allspice and cloves) are toasted and added to the blender. The charred vegetables are added to the blender along with chipotle and oregano and then the mixture is fully blended. The sauce is then poured back into the saucepan and briefly heated.

At Casa Jacaranda, they served this sauce with pork—the recipe is called Cerdo Encacahuatado (cerdo means pork)—but we decided to use chicken instead. (Pork is often cooked ahead of time in a pressure cooker and then finished up in a sauce, even when making carnitas. Chicken streamlines and shortens the recipe.) They also cook in cazuelas, glazed earthenware pots, that I have come to love in my own kitchen. Yes, you can sauté in them but, better yet, they are perfect for long slow simmers unlike enameled Dutch ovens which retain too much heat for stovetop slow cooking.

To answer the question about whether encacahuatado is a mole, it is often referred to that way, sometimes called mole cacuhuate which translates as peanut sauce. Regardless of nomenclature, the recipe is very much in line with a mole – toasted seeds, toasted chiles, a base of onion, tomato and garlic, etc. Many moles will include other ingredients – some sort of dried fruit (such as raisins or similar), bread or tortilla for thickening, and some also add chocolate although plenty of moles do not include this ingredient.

The French have their sauces but the Mexican mole is in another class altogether and encacahuatado is the perfect recipe to demonstrate the basics. You can switch up the types of chiles (guajillo is my favorite since it is mild and fruity), the nuts, the spice mixture, and add some dried fruit if you like, but this is more than a recipe, it is basic formula for creating hundreds of sauces while dreaming of walking the streets of Mexico City in the cool early morning hours.

Chris Kimball

Christopher Kimball is founder of Milk Street, which produces Milk Street Magazine, Milk Street Television on PBS, and the weekly public radio show Milk Street Radio. He founded Cook’s Magazine in 1980 and was host and executive producer of America’s Test Kitchen until 2016. Kimball is the author of several books, including "The Yellow Farmhouse" and "Fannie’s Last Supper."