At the best of times, I’m a little lazy when it comes to bringing in the harvest from my garden. We had more than a few pole beans grow absurdly large this year, and I swear the squash plants go from being not quite big enough or ripe enough to the size of SmartCar in a matter of hours. But when I recently found a baseball bat sized zucchini, I just couldn’t let it go to waste.
It’s OK to cook with a zucchini that big, but you have to peel it first. Mine was so big that I even had to scoop out the enormous seeds, but even still I had more than enough zucchini to make this delicious double chocolate zucchini bread.
Ingredients:
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3 large eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil
2 cups grated zucchini (remove excess moisture if necessary)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup chopped semisweet (or bittersweet chocolate)
Preparation:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease two loaf pans. Melt unsweetened chocolate in microwave or double boiler; stir occasionally until smooth.
- In a large bowl, combine sugar, eggs and oil. Mix well. Add grated zucchini, vanilla and melted unsweetened chocolate; beat well.
- Place the chopped semisweet chocolate in a zippered plastic bag and add 1 tbsp of flour. Toss to coat the chocolate (this prevents it from sinking to the bottom of the bread).
- Stir in the baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Add remaining flour in ½ cup increments, beating well between each addition.
- Fold in the floured chocolate chips.
- Pour batter into prepared loaf pans.
- Bake in preheated oven for 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a loaf comes out clean.
The zucchini from my garden tends to be full of water, so I grated it in a salad spinner and spun away some of the water content. If you have less watery zucchini, this might not be an issue for you. Oh – one other thing. I actually ended up with about 2 ½ cups of grated zucchini and I used it all. This recipe could really even take 3 cups of zucchini if you’ve got it. I bet you could even use a mix of zucchini and summer yellow squash.
Here are some substitutions I think you could easily make without impacting the taste and flavor greatly:
- Use egg substitute instead of eggs
- Use unsweetened applesauce instead of oil
- Use chocolate chips instead of chocolate
- Use whole wheat flour instead of white flour
Experiment with the semisweet chocolate, too. I used a 60 percent cacao content dark chocolate, but if you love milk chocolate, try that. Or use a dark chocolate with an even higher percentage cacao if that appeals to you.
Also, I’d love to hear the results of this basic quick bread with banana or pumpkin. I kept one loaf at home to share with darling fiancé and brought the other to the office. Darling fiancé said he’d never guess there was zucchini in it if he didn’t already know, and co-worker Tori said this was an excellent, if sneaky, tactic for getting her to her veggies.
