El Molcajete Sauces: Bringing the taste of Oaxaca to Evanston – Evanston RoundTable
Ernesto Rodriguez never intended to start a business. It was because of an accident – and the limited space in his freezer — that he learned to preserve his mother’s mole sauce and crossed the bridge between chef and businessman. Now, his company, El Molcajete Sauces, offers catering, cooking classes and farm-to-table dinners in addition to selling the sauce that started it all.
Oaxacan roots
The company’s story begins in Rodriguez’s childhood. Growing up in the small village of Santa Gertrudis in Oaxaca, Mexico, his family grew their own ingredients and made all of their food from scratch.
“We used to plant corn, beans, and squash. We had chickens for fresh eggs, and goats and cows for fresh milk,” said Rodriguez. “All the meals were always fresh-made right before we ate them.”
Community was emphasized, and his mother, a stay-at-home-mom, cooked for their family — Rodriguez and his five younger siblings — including a large dinner every week.
“She used to make mole sauce every Sunday,” Rodriguez said. “I started doing that with my daughter…I hope, at some point, she keeps on the same tradition.”
Mole is a traditional Mexican sauce made with unique blends of chili peppers, spices, nuts, seeds and sometimes chocolate. When Rodriguez moved to the United States at 26, memories of his mother’s sauce came with him.
An unexpected turn
“This whole company was created by accident,” said Rodriguez. “When I was in my fifth year working for a catering company, I fell from a ladder and broke my left knee, my right foot, and my left arm.”
After a surgery that did not go as smoothly as expected, Rodriguez, then a resident of San Francisco, underwent physical therapy and an extended recovery. It was during this difficult period that he founded his business.
“My mom came from Mexico to help me because I couldn’t move. She started cooking, and she made mole sauce, but you know, Mexicans, we can’t just cook a little bit,” Rodriguez said. “I started putting it in a container to put in the freezer…and then the freezer was full, and my wife was like, ‘Just tell her to stop cooking.’ I said, ‘I can’t say that to a Mexican mom. It would kill her.’”
Rodriguez said there was no single moment when he knew he was going to start a company, but the pieces fell naturally into place.
“That’s how the original idea of the company was created: the need to preserve and the amount that my mom was making,” said Rodriguez.
Learning the craft
To learn to preserve the sauce, Rodriguez found a virtual six-month canning class at the University of Tennessee. Beyond understanding how the sauce was made, he was now learning how to balance pH, measure the heat of the peppers and preserve food without preservatives or chemicals. After completing the class, he was ready to create his first mole sauce recipe.
“It took me so long, and I messed it up a lot, but once I had one recipe, I could figure out the other ones,” said Rodriguez. “You can cook with it or you can just use it as a dip. I tell people there are no rules.”
Rodriguez makes five kinds of mole sauce. All of the sauces are vegan and gluten-free and contain no artificial ingredients. Rodriguez chose to make his mole mild because his four-year-old daughter was constantly at his side as he developed his recipes.
“I started thinking about who was going to be my customer,” Rodriguez said. “Going back to the story about my mom, all of us used to eat mole every Sunday, so I decided to make them all mild.”
With his new canning license and the health department’s approval of the sauce, Rodriguez began his business. He named it after a traditional Mexican stone tool used to grind spices: El Molcajete.
A new beginning
After the Covid pandemic, Rodriguez and his family moved from San Francisco to the Chicago area, choosing Evanston for its schools and proximity to the lake.
“I started over,” Rodriguez said. “I just started walking through downtown Evanston and seeing the stores and bringing them samples. I found Evanston Latinos, and that was very helpful…People are very supportive in Evanston, and the company created itself.”
While El Molcajete offers a variety of products, its primary focus is selling Rodriguez’s jarred sauces. Alongside five varieties of mole, he produces a tomatillo sauce, an estofado sauce, and a hot chili oil. He also makes specialty salsas drawing on whatever produce is available to him at urban farms like Evanston Grows.
“I love to buy local because, in Mexico, everything is local. We don’t have big stores, so that’s how I grew up,” said Rodriguez.
The production of each sauce begins with its label, and then Rodriguez heads to a rented commercial kitchen to make a batch of each mole, consisting of 13 cases of 12 jars. It takes four days to prepare a single batch of mole sauce.
Connecting the community
A champion of local businesses, Rodriguez sells his sauces at farm stands, in local stores, and through co-ops, as well as on his website. In addition, he has allowed the company to grow organically into taking on more complicated projects.
“Something that is getting very popular are my cooking classes. We can come to your house, you can come to our kitchen, we can do it in a venue, we can do it in the park…people really like that it’s a dinner-and-a-show kind of thing, and they love to learn.”
Rodriguez offers cooking demos at farmers’ markets and at Northwestern University in addition to catering and cooking farm-to-table dinners.
“To have a community dinner with everyone talking, sharing, and connecting, it’s very good, not only for your stomach, but it’s very good for your soul,” Rodriguez said.
Although cooking classes and demonstrations were not part of his original goals for the business, he has found them rewarding and enjoys watching his company evolve.
“I not only love to cook, but I really love to share,” said Rodriguez. “When people ask me, ‘Hey, can you give me the recipe?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ It’s fun for me to connect with people through the sauce. A lot of people tell me, oh, I don’t like mole sauce, and I say, yeah, but that doesn’t mean you don’t like my sauce.”
The real mission
The company itself is not Rodriguez’s only focus. These connections with the community are what drive him to keep cooking.
“I just don’t want to have a business,” Rodriguez said. “I want to have something that means a lot to everybody.”
Everything happened so quickly when he was starting his company that Rodriguez said he never had time to put his mission statement into words. Thinking about that mission now, he is reminded of hosting large dinners with the help of his family, serving the mole sauce he has known since his childhood to people who get to experience the flavor for the first time.
“The more that I think about it, that’s what I love. That’s the mission of the company,” said Rodriguez. “To share the food, the culture, and my story.”