The Necessity of Zucchini Bread

Who wakes up in the morning and immediately thinks, “You know, what I could really go for right now is a nice thick slice of ZUCCHINI BREAD” ?

No one, that’s who. But sometimes—and especially at the end of summer—you find yourself mysteriously in the possession of an enormous zucchini, one that has been allowed to grow rampant on the vine until it’s roughly the size of your leg. No self-respecting storebought zucchini would ever approach these proportions, but here we are. 

(photo from jennyhansenauthor.wordpress.com)

So what do you do when life gives you, instead of lemons, a squash of mammoth size? 

Make zucchini bread, obvs. 

Why bread, you ask?

Well, what are your other options? A zucchini of this size can’t be minced into neat little chunks for your garden salad. You can mix it into soups or sauces, I guess, but who wants THAT MUCH zucchini in their soup? I mean, don’t get me wrong, zucchini’s great. It’s just kind of… bland.

Which makes it a pretty good (if surprising) base for quick breads. The appeal of quick breads is their moist density, not unlike pound cake, which makes them a good snack. Zucchini isn’t as inherently sweet as other quick bread bases like pumpkin or banana, but that doesn’t mean it can’t make just as tasty a bread.

When I was a kid, we had a garden and zucchini plants for a couple years. I remember when my mom made zucchini bread and, I’ll be honest, at the age of 10 or so I wasn’t the biggest fan. Fast forward 13 years: now faced with zucchini of my own, I wanted to utilize it in a delicious way. This zucchini would not go to waste!

I scoured the internet (read: searched for five minutes) for a highly-rated recipe so that my first attempt would be a guaranteed success. I found this one and used it with a few of the adjustments suggested by a commenter (always read the recipe comments!!). Here’s the actual list of ingredients I used:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp (heaping) allspice
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 3 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3-4 cups grated zucchini (NOT drained!)

Other than that, I followed the directions exactly as they appeared on the site.

My (donated) zucchini was a pretty hefty end chunk, maybe close to 2 pounds? I’m bad at estimating, but you can get an idea of the size:

(sorry for the graininess, this one was with my camera phone)

The first think I did was cut it into smaller chunks and slice the skin off. Bigger zucchinis don’t have the thin delicate skin of their smaller counterparts, so you don’t want that tough stuff in your bread. 

I also carved out the soft, pulpy middle section. It wouldn’t stand up well to grating, is too dry, and also has these big seeds (also not appealing in bread). This left me with just the “meat” of the zucchini.

Next step: grate. 

As you can see, I have one of those “collapsible” graters that is annoying 99% of the time when I’m trying to grate cheddar and it keeps folding up, but was surprisingly helpful this time when I wanted to grate into a bowl. Zucchinis have a SURPRISING amount of juice in them. Like, way more than you’d think. You want that juice in your bread so that it’s nice and moist, so grate into a bowl so you don’t lose the juice all over your cutting board/counter/whatever. 

I used the smallest grater holes so that there wouldn’t be a ton of big gross zucchini strands in my bread. No one wants to KNOW they’re eating zucchini. It’s all about maintaining the illusion.

The original recipe says 2 cups, but several commenters mentioned that more was okay, so I went whole hog and grated up everything I had. It turned out to be somewhere between three and four cups, I think.

Yum. (it’s okay if you’re still repulsed. I wasn’t exactly enthused, either.)

I followed the rest of the recipe according to plan, except I added more spices because NUTMEG AND ALLSPICE, COME ON. I love me some spices. I would’ve added cloves, too, but didn’t have any in my cupboard. :(

I threw the resulting dough/batter in a couple of loaf pans and baked at 325 for an hour. The resulting loaves look surprisingly innocuous; you’d hardly know they contain a bunch of green squash flesh. 

Of course, as with any food, the true test is taste. Is it good?

The verdict:

YES.

A THOUSAND TIMES YES.

This is not zucchini bread. This is zucchini transcendence.

Please excuse me while I go finish off the entire loaf.