September 15, 2025
During Latino Heritage Month, we celebrate community, culture, and comida! This month and every month, sharing delicious food is our love language. So we're honored to highlight chefs in our community who share their craft through tasty heritage-inspired recipes, too. Chef B Loza shared their recipe for Mole de Olla, a recipe passed down to them by their grandmother, and made their own with seafood in place of beef. By honoring our community's past, we hope to spark the future—together.
Chef B Loza is a local chef with a deep respect for Mexican culinary traditions and a fearless embrace of innovation. Chef B creates dishes that are both rooted in heritage and alive with imagination. As a queer cocinerx from Mexico City, raised in a long line of taqueros, deep values of craftsmanship, care, and community continue to shape their approach to food.
Pro Tip: You will want to use a kitchen scale to measure out your ingredients for this recipe!
Directions:
For the Broth:
For the Chochoyotes (Masa Dumplings):
For the mussels:
Plating:
Being born in Mexico City and migrating at a young age has left me with a feeling that many immigrants can identify with. In Spanish, we have the saying, "ni de aquí, ni de allá," which means "neither from here, nor from there," and that translates not only to how I grew up, but also to my style of cooking. As I have spent so many years away from Mexico, I struggled with not feeling "Mexican" enough. Growing up in Alief in Houston, Texas, I was introduced to a variety of cuisines, too. So when I began to work in kitchens, I gravitated to "New American" cuisine, which, though I learned a lot and loved very much, I felt like something was missing in my food. It wasn't until 4 years ago that I decided to work in a Mexican restaurant and began to immerse myself in my culture more and more. It's been a way for me to connect with my roots, even if I am not able to be in Mexico physically. I now find so much inspiration in the memories I have from back home. What my mom cooked for us when my brother and I were little (even the dishes I did not understand until I grew up), the meals we shared on December 25th at my grandmother's house to celebrate both Christmas and my birthday, and most importantly, the meals I ate when walking down the streets with my mom while running errands.
This dish has a very sentimental significance to me, as it was the last meal I ate before leaving Mexico. I had always loved and enjoyed Mole de Olla from a young age, so when my grandmother learned that we (my brother, my mom, and I) were joining my dad in Texas, she decided to make me my favorite dish. Traditionally, Mole de Olla is a beef and vegetable stew that is seasoned with dry chiles and thickened with masa. I have made it my own by using seafood as the main protein, specifically mussels, added chochoyotes, which are little masa dumplings that I've seasoned with epazote—a Mexican herb predominantly used for stews. I've kept the integrity of the dish with the dry chile-seasoned broth and masa dough as the thickener to give the broth a silky and deep texture I've loved for years.
