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This easy Mexican coleslaw recipe is deliciously fresh and tangy, featuring cabbage, red onion, cilantro, and cumin. Perfect as a side or on tacos!

You can’t have too many coleslaw recipes, right? Alex and I rediscovered our love for the stuff after creating our famous Best Creamy Coleslaw recipe. It’s just the right balance of tangy, savory, and sweet, perfect on our Swiss Melts with Russian dressing. But for a healthy spin that’s little lighter and fresher, here’s another delicious coleslaw recipe for you. This Mexican coleslaw has no mayo, and instead focuses on fresh flavors: crunchy cabbage, red onion, cilantro, and cumin. It’s got both cumin seed and ground cumin for a double hit of flavor. Oh–and it doubles as a taco topping. Keep reading for the recipe!

How to make Mexican coleslaw

This Mexican coleslaw is a fantastic summer side dish, and perfect on tacos too. We created it for our Grilled Shrimp Tacos, but it truly works on any taco (see below!). It’s very simple to whip up, and requires no wait time in the refrigerator either! Many coleslaw recipes require melding in the fridge for an hour or so, but this Mexican coleslaw is perfect right away. A unique feature of this recipe is that it has both cumin seed and ground cumin: to really bring out that cumin-y flavor! It’s very easy to make: the hardest part is the knife skills to chop up all the veggies.

Here’s how to make Mexican coleslaw:

Thinly slice the cabbage.
Shred the carrot, thinly slice the red onion onion, and chop the cilantro.
Mix the vegetables together with apple cider vinegar, olive oil, cumin seed, ground cumin, kosher salt and pepper. Serve immediately!

Storing leftovers

An important note on this Mexican coleslaw: it does taste best right away. If you want to make it in advance, we’d recommend slicing up the veggies and keeping the olive oil, vinegar and spices separate. Then mix them up directly prior to serving.

If you do have leftovers, you can store them refrigerated. The coleslaw may lose a little flavor over time, you could refresh the flavor with another splash of vinegar, drizzle of olive oil, and pinch of kosher salt.

How to cut cabbage

Since one of the most time-consuming parts of making this Mexican coleslaw is cutting the cabbage, here’s a trick that makes it much easier! I used to cut it in half and then hack at it until I got some “shreds.” Sometimes my knife would slip and they’d be super uneven!

This new method changed the game for me. Here I am in our home kitchen demonstrating the best way to cut cabbage: it makes cutting up the cabbage for coleslaw a breeze! PS here are all our Best Cabbage Recipes for other ways to use this tasty veggie.

How to serve Mexican coleslaw

And that’s it: all you need to know about how to make coleslaw! This Mexican coleslaw is a perfect side dish for summer, and it also works fabulously as a side to go with tacos. We recently served it for a patio party with our grilled shrimp tacos and it was a huge hit! Tacos are perfect for entertaining, especially accompanied by some frozen alcoholic drinks (am I right?!). Here are a few different ways we’d serve this coleslaw:

On Grilled Shrimp Tacos (with Lime Daiquiris in hand!)
On Jackfruit BBQ Sandwiches
With Refried Bean Dip or 5 Minute Bean Dip
With Grilled Shrimp
With grilled or Baked Salmon
With Artichoke & Quinoa Vegetarian Enchiladas
On Loaded Quinoa Tacos, Crispy Cauliflower Tacos, Instant Pot Tacos, Spiced Chickpea Tacos, or Easy Vegan Tacos

What else would you serve it with? Let us know in the comments below: and go forth and COLESLAW!

This recipe is…

This Mexican coleslaw recipe is vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, plant-based, vegan, and refined sugar free.