Zucchini Bread help needed, please

11 years ago

I am trying to duplicate a delicious zucchini bread which I was told was made with nutmeg and lemon. I tried using Paula Deen's recipe (copied below) as a starting point, because it has good reviews online. Instead of cinnamon, which dissolves and makes a brown bread, I used 2 teaspoons of nutmeg, which doesn't dissolve, allowing you to see the green zucchini shreds. I added one-half teaspoon pure lemon oil and two teaspoons of lemon zest. The recipe doesn't say to squeeze the grated zucchini, but I did do that.

The result was two apparently undercooked and rather flavorless loaves; the crusts are pleasantly chewy, but the inside is way too moist and oily. I baked them in Pyrex loaf dishes and did not reduce the oven temperature, having been told that is no longer necessary. The loaves tested done until they had cooled too much to put them back into the oven; the centers are now squishy instead of firm to the touch.

Do any of you experts have ideas for how to achieve the lemon-nutmeg loaf I am seeking? Thank you in advance for sharing your advice!

Zucchini Bread

Recipe courtesy Paula Deen

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 cups sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs, beaten

1/3 cup water

2 cups grated zucchini

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar. In a separate bowl, combine oil, eggs, water, zucchini and lemon juice. Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and fold in. Bake in 2 standard loaf pans, sprayed with nonstick spray, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. Alternately, bake in 5 mini loaf pans for about 45 minutes. (Copyright 2012 Television Food Network G.P. All Rights Reserved)

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Comments (4)

ci_lantro
11 years ago
If I was trying that recipe, out of the gate, I would cut the oil back to 3/4 or 2/3 cups and reduce the sugar to 2 cups. Also, I don't squeeze water out of zucchini unless specified to do so. Your recipe calls for an addt'l 1/3 cup of water so it wouldn't make any sense to squeeze juice out of zukes only to replace it with plain water. (Not that zucchini is nutrient dense because it isn't--you're not losing much nutritional value by squeezing out the juice but the recipe likely needs the moisture.)

Don't start to know the science of recipes but past tinkering w/ oil & sugar am'ts has told me that there is considerable leeway in recipes like this. Love baked goods & my goal is to reduce some of the calories...
cloudy_christine
11 years ago
Looks as if Paula Deen's batter isn't acidic enough to react with the baking soda.
There are z. bread recipes that succeed with just soda, but the my advice is that you just choose a recipe that uses baking powder.
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Plants can be amazingly resilient; do give these a chance. If leaves are badly damaged, as in your fifth photo, go ahead and remove and destroy (don't compost) them, as they probably don't have enough chlorophyll-containing tissue to contribute to the upkeep of the plant. However, there is no need to remove the leaves if they still have a lot of undamaged tissue - just squish the borers inside the tunnels in the leaves; you might even be able to see them if you look closely. I know, yuk, but it's them or your zukes! Besides, that's what garden gloves are for, and they're inside the leaves anyway. I trust you made drainage holes in the bottom of that bucket; if not, you need to do that now. Be careful with the Epsom salt; don't over-do. The only yellowing I see in your photos is on heavily infested leaves, and may be a by-product of that infestation. On another social media site, someone shared a site with multiple charts illustrating how plants exhibit nutrient deficiencies. I'm posting it below in case Prof. Google hasn't already shared this one with you. (By the way, I've not had a chance tor review this yet myself.) http://bigpictureagriculture.blogspot.com/2015/12/plant-nutrient-deficiency-leaf.html Looking forward to more photos and wishing you the best of luck ... I've not even planted my zuke seeds yet! Heeled in some tomato plants in that spot and they appear to have taken over.
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11 years ago
This is my go to zuke bread recipe. It never fails. I copied it out of a cookbook in 1988 after planting 9 zuke plants in my first garden. I modified it slightly to my taste, but the basic recipe never lets me down. It works well baked in small coffee cans too.

Citrusy Zucchini Bread

3 eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp lemon or orange extract
1 tsp lemon or orange zest
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups grated or shredded zucchini, drained a bit if very wet
2 1/2 cups un-sifted flour
1/2 cup wheat germ (optional, but better with it)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cups chopped walnuts (or nuts of your choice, or none at all)

Beat together eggs, oil and sugar; beat in extracts, zest and zucchini.
Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl; stir into wet ingredients and add nuts. Turn into two small, buttered loaf pans and bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Cool in pans until loaves can be removed easily, then finish cooling on wire rack. These loaves freeze well.
trixietx
11 years ago
I posted on the August New Recipes thread a recipe for lemon, blueberry, zucchini bread and it is really good, or we liked it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Lemon ,Blueberry, Zucchini Bread

Zucchini Bread help needed, please

Comments (4)

ci_lantro

cloudy_christine

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