This 'Absolutely Phenomenal' Slow Cooker Recipe Tastes Just Like My Favorite Restaurant Dish

If a Mexican restaurant has chicken mole on the menu, I immediately know what I’m going to order. Mole, a rich and earthy Mexican sauce made with several varieties of chilis, cocoa, and spices, is a no-brainer order for me—not only because it’s delicious, but also because I know how much time and how many ingredients go into making a really good mole.

Can You Make Mole Sauce In the Slow Cooker?

While there’s nothing quite like a mole sauce made by an actual Mexican chef, there is a slow cooker recipe I’ve made quite a bit for my family that tastes a lot like my favorite restaurant dish. The slow cooker chicken mole recipe from Elaine05 has been reviewed hundreds of times and gets high praise, so I had high hopes even before I tried it for the first time.

“A dark, rich, complex-flavored mole recipe, I generally shred the chicken so it will soak up the mole sauce and serve it with warmed tortillas,” writes Elaine05. “This recipe can be played with easily to tailor it to your own level of hotness or cocoa or peanut flavor. Mole is a sauce that has a lot of variations.”

How to Make Chicken Mole In the Slow Cooker

This slow cooker chicken mole recipe is truly a set-it-and-forget-it dish that I often make for a weeknight meal or prep on Sunday to use in lunches throughout the week. To make it, add a chopped onion, raisins, garlic, sesame seeds, canned chipotle peppers in adobo, peanut butter, crushed tomatoes, sugar, cinnamon, chili powder, cumin, coriander, nutmeg, and cocoa powder to a slow cooker and mix until combined. Then, throw in 1 ½ to 2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breast and let the whole thing cook for a few hours on Low. 

Once the chicken is fully cooked and easy to pull apart, I move the meat into a mixing bowl for shredding and take a look at the mole sauce in the Crock-Pot. I like my mole super smooth, so if the onions and raisins are still chunky-looking, I go through the sauce with my immersion blender to puree it a bit before tossing the shredded chicken back in.

Allrecipes Community Tips and Praise

This slow cooker mole recipe has been reviewed more than 200 times by Allrecipes community members. “Loved this recipe,” said one. “At the four-hour mark, I pulled out the chicken, shredded it with two forks, and used an immersion blender on the sauce to make it smooth … the recipe had a small amount of heat which was just right for me—others might want to increase the number of chipotle chiles used.”

Another reviewer called the dish “the easiest and most authentic-tasting chicken mole I’ve made,” while another said the slow cooker chicken meal was “absolutely phenomenal.”

“This was an amazing dish,” said another home cook. “I served it on warm tortillas with lettuce, tomato, salsa, avocado slices, hot sauce, and sour cream with Mexican-style rice on the side. [It had] a really amazing depth of flavor and so many things going on that work well together.”

How to Serve Slow Cooker Chicken Mole

The simplest way to enjoy this slow cooker chicken mole is with some rice and beans and a side of warmed tortillas. We’ve also used the meat to make rice bowls and topped salads with it. It’s a smoky, flavorful dish that pairs great with everything from taco fixings to Sloppy Joe-style sandwiches, and produces some of the most well-spiced, saucy shredded chicken I’ve made in my own kitchen. 

This dish is also a great one to double. Often, I’ll make two batches in my oversized slow cooker and freeze half of the yield for an easy weeknight dinner in the future. But truly, it’s such an easy dish to make that you don’t need to make it in advance—just toss the ingredients into a slow cooker and wait a few hours and you’ll be treated to a pretty delicious slow cooker chicken mole dinner. 

Get the recipe: Slow Cooker Chicken Mole