Pretzel Crusted Cauliflower Steaks

Pretzel Crusted Cauliflower Steaks with a creamy dairy-free Mustard Sauce! A plant-based grain-free comfort food recipe!

This is vegetables like you’ve never seen them before!

A thick slice of cauliflower (YES cauliflower!), gets coated in salty crunchy pretzels and baked until golden brown, tender, surprisingly meaty, and ultra-ultra crunchy.

And it is highly recommended that each and every bite is slathered in the creamy dreamy sauce that is all mustard, cheese, and garlic.

It’s pretzels. It's mustard cheese. It’s a magically plant-based and grain-free match made in heaven!

The MVP of our Pretzel Crusted Cauliflower Steaks has to be the pretzels. And these aren’t just any pretzels crusting out cauliflower, they are FitJoy’s new Grain Free Pretzels.

They're buttery and crunchy and salty like every good pretzel should be. But the people at FitJoy are food making wizards because somehow these twisty little salty snacks are grain-free, plant-based, and dairy-free.

They are coated with just the right amount of Himalayan pink salt and turn our slices of humble cauliflower into a restaurant-worthy, home-cooked meal.

How To Make Pretzel Crusted Cauliflower Steaks:

First things first, let’s cut our cauliflower into steaks.

Take a good look at her during this stage. Take a mental picture and tuck it away. This is the only way you’ll remember you are eating a VEGETABLE when you dig into the finished dish.

The best way to slice cauliflower into steaks is to start on one end and cut 1-inch slices all the way from one side to the other. You will be left with some rogue cauliflower that you can set aside and a few steaks from the center portion.

Each head of cauliflower will give you 2-3 steaks. This recipe is enough to make 4 steaks, so you have two ways to play this.

One is to grab two heads of cauliflower and make 4 pretzel crusted steaks. Then save the leftover cauliflower florets and roast them up later.

Or you can bread the two steaks and all the remaining cauliflower florets with pretzels. Each are equally delicious.

Once you’ve chosen your cauliflower method, it’s time to coat them in pretzels.

Start by crushing up the pretzels into small pieces that will be small enough to cling to the cauliflower but large enough to have some texture and crunch.

You can crush them by whacking them with a rolling pin or mallet #therapy. Or toss them into a blender and blending them on low speed.

Now we need the glue that will absolutely ensure that our buttery salty crunchy pretzels will stick to our cauliflower steaks because getting to the end of cooking dinner and realizing that your dream pretzel crust fell right off your cauliflower is a dinner tragedy we do not want to visit.

We whip up a grain free batter made with chickpea flour (which is also in our pretzels!), water and some seasonings like paprika and garlic to make it sing.

Then it’s as simple as one, two, three.

1. Dunk your cauliflower steak into the batter.
2. Place it into the pretzels and press to really get them to stick.
3. Transfer to a baking sheet and bake!

While the steaks cook away in the oven, we make good use of that time and whip up our sauce. Pretzels and mustard are great. Pretzels and cheese sauce are great. So logically pretzels with mustard cheese sauce are doubly great.

And this sauce is a simple 5-minute combo of raw cashews, two kinds of mustard, a bit of nutritional yeast and salt. Blend away and you are left with a creamy sauce that is the perfect complement to our pretzel cauliflower steaks.

Pull those steaks out of the oven. Marvel at their golden brown almost fried chicken like crunch, smother them in sauce and dive in.

Vegetables like you’ve never seen them before.

To read this original post in full and to find tons of other great recipes, visit Darn Good Veggies! 

Pretzel Crusted Cauliflower Steaks

Author: Laurel
Prep Time: 10
Cook Time: 60
Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
Yield: 4 servings 1x
Category: Entree
Method: Oven
Cuisine: German

Ingredients

For the steaks:

• 2 heads of cauliflower
• 1 bag FitJoy Grain Free Pretzels
• 1/2 cup garbanzo bean flour
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

For the sauce:

• 3/4 cup raw cashews
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup mustard (I prefer a combo of Dijon and yellow!)
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Cut the cauliflower into steaks:

Remove the green leaves from around the cauliflower. Start at one end and cut the cauliflower into 1 inch slices. You will have a few slices that stick together as “steaks” and some extra florets from the outside slices. (See notes for what to do with these florets!) Repeat with the second head of cauliflower – you want 4 steaks when you’re finished.

Make the steaks:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with a silicone mat and spray it with nonstick oil
2. Add the pretzels to a blender and blend on low until the pretzels are crushed. Pour them into a shallow bowl.
3. In a large shallow dish, whisk together the chickpea flour, water, mustard, garlic powder, onion powder, and salt.
4. Take one steak and dip each side into the wet chickpea batter. Transfer it to the pretzels and press the pretzels onto both sides to coat. Place the steaks on the baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes or until the cauliflower steaks are tender and the breading is crispy.

Make the sauce:

While the cauliflower bakes add all the sauce ingredients into a high speed blender. Blend until smooth, scraping down the sides as needed.

Plate it up:

Serve the cauliflower steaks with lots of cheesy mustard sauce! Enjoy.