Paleo Zucchini Bread

Zucchini Bread with Banana and Coconut Flour is a yummy and nutrient-dense way to use your veggies in high zucchini season

Zucchini is just about the most versatile food on the planet. It's good raw, cooked, eaten on its own or in a stew or casserole, and its great texture and subtle sweetness make it great for baked goods as well. 

Right now it's high zucchini season in southern Wisconsin and we're using it in all the above iterations and more. Today's task was yummy, fresh from the bakery, bread and I think you'll love the results.

Ingredients: (works perfect for doubling)
1 cup shredded zucchini, with the water pressed out of it
1/2 cup coconut flour (note: do not substitute almond flour, it really won't work)
1 ripe banana, broken into chunks or mashed with a fork
4 eggs
2 Tbsp Honey (Maple Syrup is okay, but honey works better in this recipe)
1 Heaping Tbsp Coconut Oil
3/4 tsp baking soda (baking powder also interacts great with coconut flourso feel free to play around with this)
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg or pie spice (pie spice will add more cinnamon but that's fine for this recipe)
Parchment paper or your favorite oil for greasing pans

​Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees (F)
2. Chop your zucchini then put it in your food processor. Chop up more than you think will yield one cup, and use the extra on some scrambled eggs or something. You can technically use a vitamix to shred veggies (and, well, anything), but you'll need to add liquid. See the many vitamix recipes and demos for more info

2 1/2. You'll need to monitor your processor and periodically turn it off, take off the lid, and poke the remaining chunks of vegetable down and into the blade with a spatula or spoon, otherwise they'll just chill atop the shreds and never get chopped up

When it's done, it'll look like this. I really love this picture, it encapsulates green veggie goodness plus the mess cooking and baking naturally creates. Beautiful 

3. Leave the shredded zucchini in the processor and set aside, then get your wet ingredients together. Combine your eggs, honey, coconut oil, and banana in a large dish, then beat them together. As you can see, it'll look mostly like scrambled egg batter due to the high volume of eggs; this is normal

4. Combine your dry ingredients: mix the coconut flour, baking soda, salt and spices in a medium dish and set aside

5. Back to the zucchini shreds: shredded vegetable will release a lot of water. Since you've given it a minute, the water in your shreds should have drained down, allowing you to scoop one cup of reasonably dry shreds from the top. The shreds should have a malleable but not goopy consistency, like fresh clay from art class. If they are wetter than that, set them on a couple of paper towels, wrap them up, and squeeze more moisture from them.

​6. Add the cup of shredded zucchini to the wet ingredients

7. Mix the zuke into the wet ingredients, then add the mixed dry ingredients into the wet ingredients

It might take a minute and seem a little off ratios-wise, but it will will get there

​8. Once the ingredients have been thoroughly mixed, pour it into your loaf pan. I doubled the recipe for this batch so I have more pans than you likely will

I have exactly one standard size loaf pan. I had to get creative with whatever other pyrex dishes were hanging around

9. Bake for 40 minutes or unil a fork or toothpick comes out clean. Different pans will require different time so with very small or very large pans, begin checking the bread at about 35 minutes

10. Slice and enjoy! This recipe makes one standard size loaf, which will probably be eaten in minutes. I strongly suggest doubling both as a way to use up more delicious zucchini and as a way to make sure you get a few slices all to yourself. What did you think? Did you go wild and a few handfuls of dark chocolate chips to the top of the pan? Did you go all in and try tripling the recipe? What worked for you? I'm eager to hear about your experiences in the comments