Cauliflower Tacos with Yum Yum Sauce

These cauliflower tacos with breaded cauliflower, refried beans and silky yum yum sauce are all about one thing: great taste!

Here’s the taco. Canvas for all types of delicacies, from traditional like barbacoa with tomatillo salsa to fusion like Korean beef or Thai tofu. Most of the time, Alex and I eat a whole plant-based diet, so we’re always looking for creative ways to use veggies. And the taco is the perfect canvas for creating crazy veggie flavors and textures! And this is our new favorite: these Crispy Cauliflower Tacos.

Related: The best healthy dinner recipes and the 10 best veggie tacos

Eat lots of vegetables

A new study called the EAT-Lancet Study came out recently, declaring that it’s better for the planet to eat more plants and a little less meat. It’s also a bit better for our personal health. Alex and I started eating this way about 10 years ago while reading a book by Mark Bittman called Food Matters. This is increasingly becoming a topic in research and the media.

The upside of all this is that eating lots of veggies has never been so exciting and creative! Thanks to the internet, we have access to all kinds of vegetable ideas from kitchens around the world. And literally grab it millions of recipes. Eating veggies has never tasted so good as with these Spicy Cauliflower Tacos.

What People Are Saying About These Cauliflower Tacos

These cauliflower tacos have quickly become a fan favorite at A Couple Cooks! It was so much fun hearing from those who have made and loved these cauliflower tacos. Many of you have won over vegetable grouches with this recipe! Here’s some of what people are saying:

• We made the cauliflower tacos tonight. The husband said, “These are the best veggie tacos we’ve ever made!” We’ve made MANY veggie tacos over the past 10 years. So good !!
• Made them tonight and they were delicious! I was trying to find plant based recipes that my husband will eat and enjoy and he gave it a thumbs up! Let’s definitely get to the rotation!
• I made these cauliflower tacos for one vegetarian and three meat eaters tonight!! We loved them all!! Such interesting flavors!!

How to make cauliflower tacos

Alright, let’s get to that recipe! We have a delicious cauliflower tacos recipe in our Pretty Simple Cooking cookbook, but we’ve never posted one here on A Couple Cooks. So there you have it: the star of these easy cauliflower tacos is our Crispy Breaded Cauliflower. It is oven roasted and coated in a savory, salty, sweet and slightly spicy breading. It’s a bit like a breaded fish taco game (though of course the flavor is very different!).

Top this off with chilled black beans, flavorful slaw and cilantro. (We used canned beans, but you can also make our homemade version.) Then top it off with a delicious sauce: this yum yum sauce recipe. Yum yum sauce is used in Japanese steakhouses and served with seafood, but here we used it as a “fusion” item to complement this vegetarian taco recipe. It’s so delicious and adds incredible richness to tacos. It’s certainly not a healthy food per se, but a little goes a long way here!

If you want to make a sauce other than the yum yum sauce for these cauliflower tacos (there’s a vegan version in this sauce recipe), here are some additional ideas for delicious taco sauces that would be perfect here:

Looking for more vegan and vegetarian tacos?

Aside from these crispy cauliflower tacos, here are some of our favorite vegan and vegetarian taco recipes:

This cauliflower taco recipe is…

Vegetarian, gluten-free, without refined sugar and naturally sweetened. For vegans, plant-based and dairy-free, use the vegan version of yum yum sauce or chipotle tahini sauce.