Celebrate Cinco de Mayo With These 11 Meatless Mexican Recipes

This Cinco de Mayo, we’re celebrating with a vegan Mexican feast. We’re always looking for new culinary projects, so we’re taking inspiration from this holiday and trying out new Mexican recipes we’ve yet to master alongside beloved favorites. From vegan champurrado to tamales, try out one of these 11 recipes and enjoy a homemade Cinco de Mayo feast. 

Restaurant deals for Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday that has gained widespread popularity across the US, and often, restaurants offer exclusive deals to mark the occasion. Take California-based Café Gratitude for example. This year, the vegan restaurant is offering a prix fixe, two-course menu for $15 per person. Choose between loaded nachos, crispy taquitos, tacos, or a Mexican-style bowl for your main course. Pair it with your choice of iced horchata coffee, tepache soda, sangria, or Mexican lager.

Tacotarian

In Las Vegas and San Diego, vegan taco chain Tacotarian is offering discounts on margaritas. From 3pm to 6pm, customers can enjoy this adults-only bev for just $6.50. And in New York City, Jajaja Mexicana (another all-vegan dining destination) is offering a buy-one-get-one-free deal on margaritas. For even more deals, check with your local, vegan-friendly Mexican restaurant.

But, if you’d like to enjoy a homemade Mexican feast, you can’t go wrong with these recipes. 

Vegan Mexican recipes for Cinco de Mayo

Whip up these vegan Mexican recipes for a Cinco de Mayo feast.

1 Simple Classic Guacamole

What’s a feast without appetizers? This easy, classic guacamole comes together with just eight ingredients you likely already have in your pantry. Creamy avocados get a touch of tart, tang, and zest thanks to a squeeze of lime, fresh cilantro, and diced onions and tomato. Serve with warm tortilla chips and dunk away.
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2Portabello “Huitlacoche” Tamales

If you think you don’t like tamales, you simply have not experienced a good one. This recipe calls for huitlacoche, a rare Mexican delicacy often called “corn truffle” or “corn mushroom” which imparts a wonderfully smoky flavor. Can’t find huitlacoche near you? Portabello mushrooms make for an excellent substitution. Put some festive music on, crank out a few dozen, then store leftovers in the freezer. You can have Mexico City-style tamales for weeks! 
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Jeff Wysocarski

3Sweet Potato and Kidney Enchiladas

This hearty meal is guaranteed to make your hunger vanish. Kidney beans, baked sweet potatoes, and smoky-spicy Mexican-style sausage come together for this dinnertime favorite. Trust us, you’ll want to add this cheesy dish to your weekly rotation. 
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Bailey Ruskus

4Seared Sweet Potato Flautas With Avocado Salsa Verde

These crispy rolled tacos make for an excellent Cinco de Mayo entrée. Ground walnuts impart a meaty texture that pairs perfectly with sweet potato. Drizzle with avocado salsa and dairy-free sour cream for the ultimate main. 
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Mexican Made Meatless

5Sopes and gorditas

Make two different staples with the same masa-based dough with this recipe from Mexican Made Meatless. Sopes are small, thick cakes of masa with elevated edges to contain a filling; they are grilled and sometimes fried. Gorditas are made from the same dough and also grilled (traditionally on a comal) but instead of edges, they are flat and sliced in half, similar to a pita pocket. “Meant to be enjoyed as little bites to calm the hunger in between meals, they end up being more like the actual meal,” explains recipe developer Nancy Lopez. Whether you enjoy them as your main, snack, or appetizer, sopes and gorditas are both excellent vessels for something as simple as refried beans or store-bought vegan al pastor. 
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Robin Robertson

6 Poblano Mole

Once you master mole, you have a flavor bomb of a sauce that you can slather on almost anything—jackfruit, chips, roasted peppers, beans, burritos—even basic steamed veggies reach new heights when smothered in this complex sauce. Pro tip: the longer the mixture simmers, the more pronounced the flavors. This isn’t a quick recipe, but the delayed gratification is well worth it. 
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Dora’s Table

7 Bolillos

Think of a bolillo as your everyday, versatile white bread. They’re traditionally torpedo-shaped and can be used in a variety of delicious applications—from stuffing them with vegan cheese and sliced jalapeños to slicing in half for tortas (the equivalent of a Mexican sandwich). Fluffy on the inside with a crackly exterior, this basic bread is simple to make and requires minimal ingredients. “If you’ve never baked bread before, this is the perfect starting point,” writes Dora Ramírez of Dora’s Table. “This is a pretty straight forward recipe, easy, and you only need flour, sugar, yeast, and water.”
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Sweet Simple Vegan

8 Refried beans

Do homemade refried beans require more effort than opening a can of store-bought beans? It depends—we’ve struggled with some difficult can-openers. The scratch-made version of this Mexican staple is so simple to make and exponentially better than the canned variety. Amplify any dish with a scoop of these flavorful, melt-in-your-mouth pintos or go back to basics and savor the simplicity of a basic bean burrito—no cheese required.  
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Más by Denise

9Champurrado

Like hot chocolate, but better, champurrado is a comforting sweet beverage made deliciously thick and luscious thanks to the addition of masa. The drink isn’t grainy—it’s smooth and decadent with just the right touch of chocolate. If you can, it’s worth a trip to a Latinx grocer or purchasing the key ingredients online. The piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar packed into a cone shape) is especially important in this recipe. “If you make this recipe, definitely add piloncillo—it makes such a difference,” Más by Denise explains.
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Thyme & Love

10Conchas 

A concha is a round Mexican sweet bread with a thick coating of sugar on top. They’re best eaten straight from the oven—just cooled enough to nearly burn your fingers as you tear into the melt-in-your-mouth, bready, sugar-coated goodness. If you plan to munch on a room-temperature concha, “serve with a cup of coffee—you just might find yourself dipping your concha into” your morning brew, recommends recipe blog Thyme & Love. For an even sweeter bite, dunk your concha into a steaming mug of thick champurrado. 
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Carrots & Flowers

11Tres Leches Cake

We still haven’t figured out how this cake can be soaked in three different kinds of (vegan) milk and not crumple into a soggy mess, but somehow, it just works. This vanilla sheet cake is moist, tender, light, fluffy, and creamy all in one. They key to achieving the signature flavor and moistness is all in the milk soak. It gets better as it sits, so go ahead and make a whole cake for yourself. It’ll last in the fridge for a few days. 
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