Zucchini bread is a delicious breakfast or snack and an ideal use for those “garden tumors” that start coming to a fruition with a vengeance this time of year. Making these great loaves isn’t very difficult, but it can get a lot of dishes dirty.

We set out to show how you can double the usual recipe, and make four loaves at a time. If you have a stand mixer and a food processor for chopping, you can make up the batter for the bread in about 10 minutes and have the loaves in hand an hour later. The order of steps in this recipe tries to optimize use of the food processor and mixer.

If you have a 5 quart stand mixer, you may want to use the plastic splash guard to keep the bowl from overflowing. If you have a 6 quart stand mixer, spilling over is much less likely: just start the mixer at low speed and then slowly increase it.

• 2 cups pecans or walnuts
• 2 medium or 1 large zucchini
• 8 eggs
• 4 cups sugar
• 2 cups vegetable oil
• 7 cups flour
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 3 tsp vanilla
• 2 cups raisins
• 4 loaf pins
• Nonstick spray

 

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F

2. Chop the nuts in the food processor and set aside.

3. Using a shredding disk, shred the zucchini until you have more than 4 cups of zucchini.

4. Break the eggs into the mixing bowl of the stand mixer.

5. Add the sugar and mix.

6. Add the oil and mix.

7. Add the flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and baking powder and mix very slowly until the flour is taken up into the batter, then increase the speed and mix until uniform.

8. Take a fistful of shredded zucchini at a time and wring it out to remove excess water and add to a 2 cup pitcher until full. Add to the batter.

9. Repeat with 2 more cups of zucchini.

10. Slowly mix the zucchini into the batter. Some stand mixers have a collar to prevent splashing over. You can use it if you want, but if you mix things in slowly it should all fit.

11. Add the raisins and nuts and mix until uniform.

12. Spray the loaf pans with the nonstick spray.

13. Divide the batter among the four pans and bake for 55-60 minutes at 350.

14.The loaves are done with a toothpick comes out clean.

15. Cool and remove from the pans.

These loaves freeze very well. We generally wrap each in foil and then place in a plastic zipper bag to prevent them drying out in the freezer.

During peak zucchini season, we usually make this recipe 3-4 times and have bread for the whole year.

A neat trick for dividing up the batter

Getting the batter evenly divided among the four loaf pans is a little harder than it seems and since the batter is lumpy, it is hard to eyeball.

Instead, we weighed the empty mixing bowl (ours weighed 1014 g) and then weighed the batter-filled bowl. (You can use the Tare button to zero the scale with the empty bowl on it.) It weighed 4792 g, making the contents weigh 3778 g. Thus, dividing by 4, each loaf pan should get 944 g of batter.

So we put each loaf pan on the scale, pressed the Tare button to zero it, and spooned in about 944 g of batter. This worked way better than we’ve ever been able to to by estimating, and we’ve been baking these for years.

Your kitchen scale is your friend!