Finding Balance in Zucchini Bread

I found a recipe for zucchini bread from Paula Deen’s website. On first glance I new this would more like a cake than bread, but I followed the recipe exactly as written. Well, except I used Olive oil instead of some other vegetable oil, but I don’t count that as a major change. It’s still oil. I also used lime instead of lemon juice; again, I don’t think that makes a difference. It’s still an acidic citrus juice.

Ingredients:
2 cup grated zucchini
1/3 cup water
4 eggs, beaten
1 cup vegetable oil
3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1½ teaspoon salt
3¼ cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Directions:
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 greased standard loaf pans, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. Alternately, bake in 5 mini loaf pans for about 45 minutes.
Yield: 2 loaves
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour

I love that she says the prep time is ten minutes. Obviously there isn’t a demanding toddler tugging at her pants leg and weaving between her legs like a cat the entire time she makes her zucchini bread. The recipe made “as is” was very tasty, and is fabulous if you hate zucchini, but I wanted something that would allow me to actually taste the zucchini. So I altered this recipe. I doubled the amount of zucchini. I relied on the added zucchini to provide the bread with enough moisture so I removed the water entirely and cut the amount of oil in half. I saw a few other recipes that replace some of the oil with applesauce but I didn’t want to add another ingredient. I cut the amount of sugar in half and used brown sugar instead of cane sugar. Cutting the sugar made the nutmeg stand out a lot so I cut that in half as well. I added the nuts in my very first batch, but in following batches I left them out. I find that nuts are a normal part of everyday life but they optional in bread. Here is my final revised sugar and zucchini balanced recipe:

Ingredients:
4 cups grated zucchini
4 eggs, beaten
½ cup olive oil
1½ cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1½ teaspoon salt
3¼ cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon lime juice
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar. In a separate bowl, combine olive oil, eggs, zucchini and limejuice. Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and fold in. Bake in 2 greased standard loaf pans, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. Alternately, bake in 5 mini loaf pans for about 45 minutes.
Yield: 2 loaves
Prep time: 10 minutes (depending on distractions)
Cook time: 1 hour