Zucchini Bread Extraordinaire

Here in Ohio, it's zucchini season again, and if by chance you grow your own, you probably have more zucchini on your hands than you have recipes. Our favorite family way to "get rid of it," so to speak, is to bake it into bread. My personal favorite is chocolate bread, but I have the recipes here for both chocolate and traditional. Better yet, you can do more than just make bread. I chose to make easy-to-eat muffins of my batch, and my grandma suggested we do what she used to do to pass off zucchini bread to us kids - bake a pan of "brownies." (She also suggested that we make our brownies with peanut butter chips. Quite a smart baker.) We baked four batches in a day, starting after lunch, stopping for dinner (of zucchini and pasta; go figure) and continuing until about eight o'clock. If you would like to make only one batch and divide up your batter for variations, that is always an option. We make a lot while the zucchini is ripe and store it in the freezer for quite a while.

Here are the original recipe cards we use:


















(You'll notice the source of this recipe is "Jane Westfall;" she is also the legendary source of the best sugar cookies anyone in my family has ever had, but that was before my time. I hope to tackle that recipe as well some day.)









And here is one I've simplified for you:









1. Prepare the Zucchini.




You can use a traditional flat grater over a bowl, or a stand-alone grater on a cutting board; leave the zucchini whole for this method. We make so much that we use a food processor with the grater attachment. If you have one and ever wondered what the center stick and the flat grater-plate are for, this is the perfect opportunity to try them out. Just make sure that if yours is both a grater and a slicer, the grater nubs are up, or you will get slices instead of shreds. Another bonus to the food processor is that your zucchini holds up a little better; it looks more like a fine julienne than the hand graters, which produce finer results (TIP: then again, if you're trying to hide the zucchini from kids, maybe a hand grater is the way to go). For the food processor, slice the zucchini into 1"x5" pieces and load them into the feed tube; turn it on and push them down using the feed pusher only. Do not use anything else to push items down; it is extremely dangerous, and the feed pusher is perfectly measured to stop before it hits the blades. Here you can see we have pre-measured our 2 Cups of zucchini per batch so that we grate only as much as we need; you can use a 2-Cup glass measuring cup, store the zucchini in the fridge as you work, and clean the measuring cup for other uses, or simply clean it and get it out of your way.


2. Prepare the pans and turn on the oven to 350ºF. You'll want to grease and flour your pans for easy release; this is very important or you may have a disaster. My great-grandmother used a handful of waxed paper dipped in Crisco to smear it into her pans; we used Pam cooking spray. Then put a small amount of flour in the pans and turn the pan to coat the bottom and sides. You may have to whack the pan if the flour sticks in clumps. TIP: It is easiest to do this over a sink and then just run the tap when you're finished to clean up the mess. TIP: Here we have mixed a little cocoa in with the flour to prevent a white coating on the bottom; pure flour on a chocolate bread just isn't as presentable, and the cocoa darkens the flour so that it isn't noticeable.


3. Assemble the ingredients. TIP: It's most convenient to get everything out onto the counter before you start working, because if you're like me, you have had occasions in the past when you had half the ingredients in a bowl already when you realized you only had 2 eggs instead of 3 in your fridge or that your baking powder was months out of date, and you may not have the convenience of a grandmother that lives 2 minutes down the road to bail you out.

If you'll notice on our original recipe cards, one has its ingredients neatly organized, and the other does not. I have even gone so far in my chart as to change the order of organized ingredients, because you'll want to assemble the dry ingredients first, in a medium-sized bowl. TIP: This makes your life much easier, for many reasons. A. You want to mix dry ingredients amongst themselves so you don't get random pockets of baking soda (or any other ingredient) in your bread. B. Your eggs will be beaten when you need to add the dry ingredients, and if you stop for too long to get all of your dry ingredients together, your fluffy egg mixture can fall a little. C. You want to use your measuring cups for all of the dry ingredients first, and then the wet ingredients; I used the 1-Cup dry cup for flour, then sugar, then oil, and then eggs. If I had done this with the oil first, I'd have to wash out the cup between uses or be faced with a sticky mess inside the cup.

4. Mix your batter, using an electric mixer (stand mixer or hand mixer).
----------Put sugar, oil and vanilla together in mixing bowl, and mix just until all the sugar looks evenly wet.
----------Add eggs and beat on medium or medium-high speed until eggs look evenly yellow and light, only a minute or two. TIP: Never crack your eggs straight into the mixing bowl or you may be fishing little shell pieces out with a spoon. TIP: Save the 1-Cup and 1/2-Cup measuring cups after you've measured your cocoa and flour/sugar/oil; crack the eggs into the 1-Cup and put the shells into the 1/2-Cup so you don't have to dirty another bowl or carry your egg shells to the trash, immediately or over your floor. (The 1-Cup already has oil in it, and now egg; dump the shells in the trash when it's convenient and use the 1/2-Cup later for additions, as long as there aren't any tiny shell pieces in there.)
----------Add zucchini and mix just until it looks well-distributed.
----------Add flour mixture in a few stages. TIP: Turn the mixer on low for about 15 seconds to get it mixing and then you can turn it on higher to speed things up; do not turn it on too high at first or flour will fly everywhere.
----------Add your additional ingredients. This is the part when you add chocolate chips, nuts, or anything else that you would like. TIP: Use a slow speed and do not mix too long or the beaters may break up your ingredients. TIP: The recipe calls for 1 Cup of nuts, but if you are varying things, you can play with this a little. I wanted pecans, chocolate chips and coconut in mine, and adding 1 cup of each would have made a huge batter that would have ultimately not baked together well; adding only 1 Cup total would have resulted in not much of each ingredient. I compromised and added 1/2 Cup of each ingredient.

5. Fill your pans and bake. Just about any form you use should be filled to 2/3 capacity. The original recipe (including 1 Cup of nuts) makes two regular sized loaf pans, but my batch with 1 1/2 Cups of additions made two muffin pans (12 muffins each) and then some.



TIP: Don't forget to rotate your pans halfway through baking if they are not on the same rack. They rise differently based on where they are located in the oven; the muffins on the top rack had more evenly-rounded tops, while the ones that started on the lower rack were not quite as nice on top. (In the photo shown here, the silver pan was on the bottom initially and the tan pan was on the top.) This problem would have been much more pronounced if I had never switched them. Simply set the timer for half the time, switch them, and then reset the timer for the other half. To make sure your muffins are done, you can insert a toothpick (or a knife if you must, but that will essentially ruin one muffin) and see if it comes out with no batter clinging to it. TIP: My grandma bakes enough that she bought a cake tester, shown here. It is longer and has a handle, making it easier and safer to use. TIP: Use a potholder to slide the rack out first, and then test. Do not reach all the way into the oven with a bare hand when you are using two racks and have less clearance to avoid burns.

Of course if you have varying sizes of pans in one oven, they will take different baking times. Our muffins took 20 minutes, but the little leftover pan took an extra 10.

Allow the bread to cool some before removing from pans, and store in an airtight container. The bread can also be frozen; a loaf is easy to wrap in plastic wrap and then in foil before placing in the freezer, but muffins can be placed on a plastic or paper plate and placed inside a large zipper bag.

A few things to note:

Healthier recipes: We substituted Whole-Wheat flour for all of the flour in our recipes, and did not notice a difference in the texture (some recipes call for mostly refined flour with only a little Whole-Wheat substituted, because the extra gluten present in the Whole-Wheat can cause a denser, chewier consistency). We also made a batch in an even healthier way, substituting 3/4 Cup of unsweetened applesauce for the 1 Cup of oil, and replacing half of the sugar with Splenda (use the granulated for-baking kind; Splenda from the packet is concentrated and does not measure equally for sugar, but the granulated version does.) TIP: I was not ready to try omitting all the sugar because sugar contributes not only to sweetness but consistency; it makes things a little gooey. (If you've ever had chocolate chip cookies that were not as soft as you would have liked, it could be because the sugar was beaten too long and the granules became too small to melt and create tiny little pockets in the cookie.) These healthier muffins were a little more cakey and not as fudgey as the original chocolate recipe, which you may be able to see in this photo.

Baking Powder: You'll notice that the traditional, non-chocolate recipe has much more baking powder in it. Baking powder is a leavening agent that causes the batter to rise, because gases are formed that create little bubbles throughout the bread. More leavening, more bubbles, lighter bread, as you can see here in this photo. Our best guess as to why the chocolate recipe has so much less baking powder is so that it is a little more fudgey.

Brownies: As I mentioned before, my grandma swears she used to bake this recipe as brownies when we were kids, and that we had no idea there were vegetables involved. It must have worked, because I don't remember it - brownies are brownies when you're a kid. We baked a batch of peanut butter chip brownies, although the recipe is big enough that we used a 10"x14" pan and it was still a thick, cakey brownie. You could always try omitting 1 egg for a less cakey brownie (which is what the brownie boxes say to do), but don't forget to still use a larger pan than the typical 9"x13" or to use two smaller pans with a combined greater area than one 9"x13".

Here are our completed products, with a muffin cut open to show you their internal texture. We managed to make four variations: A. muffins with coconut, pecans and mini chocolate chips [center], B. muffins with applesauce instead of oil and half the sugar with mini chocolate chips [right], C. brownies with peanut butter chips [left], and D. traditional bread with sweetened dried cranberries and pecans.