All the tips and tricks you need to make the BEST Zucchini Bread recipe of your life! This easy bread bakes up moist, tender, and super flavorful! Easily turn it into chocolate chip zucchini bread, or add nuts!
I’m sitting here working on this zucchini bread post and Eric (who is still working from home #covid) walks in to change his shirt. He was wearing a pink button up shirt, and he proceeded to change into
I said, “I’m sorry, did you just change from a pink button up shirt…into another pink button up shirt?” Long silence. I’m laughing. He looks up.
Healthy Chocolate Zucchini Bread
Well friends, guess what, he did. And now you know that you can show up at my house anytime day or night and Eric is going to be PRESSED AND READY. He even wears a collared shirt to bed. Not really, I’m kidding, but it is true that he wore a collared shirt with a classy sweater over the top when I went in to the hospital to have our son, and the nurses nicknamed him “Dapper Dad.” Oh Eric, how I love you!
Is summer in full swing in your neck of the woods? I know it’s summertime when traffic on these Rhubarb Shortbread Bars starts going crazy. Bring on the summer bounty!
Have you planted any zucchini? Do you have a ton?? I am what you might call “gardening challenged” so I usually don’t bother. Even zucchini, globally known as the easiest vegetable to grow, has proven too difficult for us. Thank you, farmers of America, for being good at your jobs so that I can make this zucchini bread!
Easy Zucchini Bread Recipe
If you have never taken a glorious bite of warm, buttered zucchini bread, you are missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures. Zucchini bread is a quick bread, meaning it has no yeast and is leavened with baking soda or baking powder (kind of like a muffin, but in loaf shape). It is made with grated zucchini and is usually spiced with cinnamon.
My mom has been making zucchini bread for as long as I can remember. She has a recipe in the family recipe book that she gave all of us kids when we left for college. The title reads, “Zucchini Bread Recipe (you can’t taste the zucchini, I swear!)” Which begs the question…
Nope! Zucchini has a pretty mild flavor, so all it does in baked goods is add moisture. No zucchini flavor. Just delicious sweet bread.
Classic Zucchini Bread Recipe
I mean if you can’t taste it, what’s the point in adding it to your quick bread?? It’s a valid question. The answer is moisture and texture. And abundance, if we’re being honest, right? Who here is looking for a zucchini bread recipe because you have a bajillion zucchini in your garden and don’t know what to do with it all??
Zucchini is mostly water, so it brings tons of moisture to baked goods. Not just any moisture though: flavorless moisture that is basically calorie free. You really can’t taste the zucchini in zucchini bread, just the same way your carrot cake doesn’t really taste like carrots. All you taste is moist delicious cake, and moist delicious zucchini bread!
No, there’s really no need. The peel on zucchini is thin and soft, so it incorporates easily into zucchini bread without messing with the texture.
The Best Zucchini Bread Recipe
There are so many things to consider when making zucchini bread. I tested a whole bunch of different variations of several recipes to see what I liked best. Here are some of the conclusions I came to that help us get to the very best bread!
1. A mix of granulated sugar and brown sugar. Many classic zucchini bread recipes call for only white sugar. I found that I like to use a mix of both white and brown to bring in that carmel-y flavor, and of course the extra moistness that brown sugar brings! This does make the bread a bit darker, but I didn’t hear any complaints from my testers.
2. What spices should we add for flavor? Cinnamon is standard. I tested several spice mixes and landed on a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom. I’m a cardamom lover and add it to almost any recipe that has cinnamon (like this Apple Pie), but you can totally skip it if you want. Don’t leave out the nutmeg though! It really rounds out the flavor of this zucchini bread.
The Best Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread Recipe
Two of my biggest issues with quick bread are dryness and lack of flavor. Many recipes call for just oil or just butter. Oil makes cakes and bread supremely moist (it it 100% fat; butter is about 80% fat). But butter brings that rich flavor we all love. Solution? Use both! Ultimate moist texture and delicious buttery flavor. We’re also adding in a little sour cream for moisture!
4. Mix ins. Do you add chocolate chips to your zucchini bread? Nuts? I love it both ways (but not combined.) The photos today show one batch with chocolate chips and one batch with walnuts. If you add chocolate chips, your bread is going to feel more like a slice of cake (no complaints here). If you add nuts, it’s going to taste more like a traditional quick bread.
5. The squeeze. Texture is everything for me when it comes to zucchini bread. The secret to getting the right texture is squeezing some of the water out of the shredded zucchini before adding it to your bread. Squeezing is kind of annoying, I know. Blotting with a paper towel achieves almost the same effect and is easier. More on that below.
Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread — Salt & Baker
There is nothing sadder than slicing into your loaf of bread to find that it’s raw in the middle. Usually zucchini bread takes about an hour to bake, but sometimes it takes even longer.
Zucchini bread is kind of tricky because there are so many variables, like the type of pan you’re using, the temperature of your oven, the level of moisture in your bread.
My favorite method for testing doneness is a regular old toothpick. Poke it deep into the center of your bread. If it comes out with any wet batter, add another 4-5 minutes to your bake time. You might have to repeat this process several times! (Especially since every time you open your oven to check, you’re lowering the temperature.) Don’t take your bread out until there is no batter on the toothpick. If the top of your bread is over browning, cover it with foil.
Zucchini Bread Recipe
The only thing you need to worry about is if you added chocolate chips to your bread. Poke it in a few places to make sure it’s just chocolate on the toothpick, not wet batter. Zucchini bread is quite moist because of all the liquid from the zucchini, so I always err on the side of over baking slightly rather than risking a raw center (I will happily eat over baked bread. I will throw raw bread directly in the trash.)
Pro tip: I tried baking this using the convection setting on my oven and I found that it had absolutely no effect. Usually convection helps bake things faster, but zucchini bread is so dense that even if that oven air is being fanned around, it’s going to take just as long.
Pro tip: don’t chop off the little knobby end. Use it as a handle! Then you don’t accidentally grate your fingers. (Been there!) Or you can use the grating tool on a food processor. Either way works great!
Healthy Peanut Butter Banana Zucchini Bread
You are going to want 12 ounces of zucchini for this recipe. That’s about 2 cups. Make sure you pack the zucchini into the measuring cup if you are not weighing it. If you have huge zucchini with seeds in it, scrape out and discard the seeds before grating.
To squeeze or not to squeeze, that is the question. The answer is maybe, maybe not; it depends entirely on what texture you prefer in your zucchini bread.
I tested it both ways, all things being equal except I squeezed one and didn’t squeeze the other. Both resultant breads were delicious, but the one that hadn’t been squeezed had my least favorite quick bread quality: gumminess.
Healthy Zucchini Bread
All that moisture from the zucchini gets baked into the bread. The edges don’t get as crispy, and it has a heavier weight.
The squozen bread, on the other hand, is light and airy. It is fluffy, and, well, bread-like, with perfectly crispy edges. The ultimate goal for a quick bread, right? The bread was not dry at all. I definitely recommend blotting or squeezing liquid out of your zucchini before adding it to your bread!
(Last year I did a bunch of testing with banana bread. I found that the main thing that defines good banana bread vs. bad banana bread is a gummy texture. The trick is to not add too much banana. You can read all about it on my Banana Bread post. For zucchini, the amount that you add is not as important as making sure you blot or squeeze out some of the liquid.)
Apple Carrot Zucchini Bread
Here’s how I like to blot shredded zucchini.
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