Zucchini bread!
People, it is zucchini season. This fact lead me to have an abundance of zucchini in my fridge that needed to transform itself into meals as soon as possible. What to do with too much zucchini? Make zucchini bread of course! The only thing holding me back was grating it, but actually, zucchini is the perfect consistency for grating; kind of fun when you get into it. Anyways, enough of that, on to the recipe!
This one comes to us from the wonderful/awful Silver Palate Cookbook. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the Silver Palate is a loving, spiteful, but most of all complicated mistress. It can be difficult to make her recipes come through, but when they do, they do not disappoint. Oh man, this bread is so good. As you can see, I had to hurry up and take a photo before I gobbled up the rest of the bread. This one is also definitely an “easy” on their scale of difficulty.
- some butter for greasing the pan
- 3 eggs
- 3/4 cup vegetable oil
- 1.5 cups sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 cups grated unpeeled zucchini
- 2.5 cups flour
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp cloves
- 1 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 and grease a standard loaf pan. Sift the dry ingredients together in a small bowl and set aside. Beat the eggs, oil, sugar, and vanilla with an electric mixer until “light and thick.” Light and thick required a bit too much mixing for my little hand mixer to handle. Instead my batter got to somewhat thick but still quite runny. Either way the bread ended up tasting fine. Add the zucchini to the mixture. Stir in the dry ingredients until just blended. Add the walnuts if you’re using them. (I didn’t use walnuts only because I didn’t have them in the house. I’m sure this bread would be even more delicious with them added.) Pour the batter into the buttered loaf pan and bake for 1 hour, 15 minutes. Cool slightly and then turn onto a wire rack and cool completely.
This bread keeps very well for about one week. I’ve been just storing it in a ziploc bag and it still tastes great. Especially good slathered in your buttery spread of choice.
