Cook & Dine: Make Authentic Mexican Mole and Salsas in San Miguel de Allende

Overview

Learn to cook authentic mole sauce, enmoladas, and traditional Mexican rice on a private hands-on cooking class in San Miguel de Allende, finished with regional wine and cacao chocolate.

A hands-on private cooking class in San Miguel de Allende. Prepare a real mole sauce, enmoladas, and traditional Mexican rice with step-by-step guidance, with dishes and recipes adaptable to dietary restrictions. Once everything is ready, sit down to enjoy the meal with a glass of regional wine and a cacao chocolate drink.

Highlights

• Real Mole Sauce From Scratch Learn to prepare an authentic mole sauce and enmoladas with step-by-step guidance.
• Traditional Mexican Rice Round out the meal with a classic side dish.
• Regional Wine & Cacao Drink Sit down to your own cooking with a glass of regional wine and a traditional cacao chocolate drink.

What Stops Does This Tour Make?

A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.

Important Information

Frequently Asked Questions

About This Tour

Learn to cook authentic mole sauce, enmoladas, and traditional Mexican rice on a private hands-on cooking class in San Miguel de Allende, finished with regional wine and cacao chocolate. A hands-on private cooking class in San Miguel de Allende. Prepare a real mole sauce, enmoladas, and traditional Mexican rice with step-by-step guidance, with dishes and recipes adaptable to dietary restrictions. Once everything is ready, sit down to enjoy the meal with a glass of regional wine and a cacao chocolate drink.

Mole's name comes from the Nahuatl word mōlli, meaning 'sauce' — specifically a sauce made by grinding, since the related verb mola means 'to grind.' That act of grinding chiles, spices, nuts, seeds, and other ingredients together on a volcanic molcajete, a tool that dates back to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, is still the technique at the heart of a real mole today. The Aztecs are recorded serving mole-like sauces to emperors and offering them to the gods well before the Spanish arrived; what makes the dish as it's known today is the layering-in of Old World ingredients like chocolate during the colonial period, which is part of why mole is often held up as Mexico's defining dish of mestizaje — its blended indigenous and European heritage.

You may hear a popular story on this class that mole was invented by accident by nuns at a convent in Puebla, scrambling to prepare a feast for a visiting archbishop with nothing but scraps of chile, nuts, stale bread, and chocolate. It's a good story, repeated for generations, but historians treat it as legend rather than documented fact — the true origin of mole's recipe isn't actually known, and both Puebla and Oaxaca (sometimes called the 'land of the seven moles') have real, longstanding claims to the dish, alongside distinct mole traditions found in many other Mexican states.

Enmoladas, one of the dishes on this class's menu, are built on the same idea as a familiar relative: tortillas rolled or dipped and bathed in sauce, the way an enchilada is — except here the sauce is mole rather than a simple chile or tomato base. Pairing it with a classic red rice (arroz rojo) is itself a long-running combination on Mexican tables, the starchy rice built to soak up whatever sauce sits beside it.

The cacao drink that closes the meal reaches back even further than mole does. Cacao was already being dried and roasted in Mexico by the Olmec civilization around 1500 BC, and by the time of the Maya and Aztec empires, chocolate drinks — often thick, frothy, and spiced with chile rather than sweetened — were used in religious ceremonies, marriage celebrations, and even as currency. The Aztecs considered cacao a gift from the god Quetzalcoatl, which is part of why the simple cup you'll be handed at the end of this class carries a lot more history than its size suggests.