Saturday, August 12, 2006

Low Fat Zucchini Bread

I was given an enormous zucchini, and I decided I wanted to make zucchini bread. My trusty Betty Crocker cookbook only had a recipe that called for shortening. Not having shortening on hand, I turned to the internet for a recipe. Again and again I found recipes that contained 1 cup or more of vegetable oil. Ugh! Probably very tasty but not so good nutritionally. But I finally found this one that contained only 1/3 cup oil and used applesauce to make it still moist and edible. Recipe here

I made this Thursday and it was great. I made it again today. I still have almost enough zucchini to make a 3rd batch. (I said it was a big zucchini.)

I did have one problem -- the recipe called for a smaller loaf pan than mine. But it made 2 loaves -- maybe it would all fit in one? But once I mixed up the batter, I could tell I'd have a mess on my hands if I did that. So I used my large loaf pan and put the rest of the batter in a mini loaf pan I have, one of a set of 4 that I bought a while back. I baked the big one longer than the small one, of course.

I also made some modifications to the recipe:

First, I added half a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips to the batter. The bread would still be good without that, but this made it really good.

Also, I reduced the oil to 1/4 cup, added about a tablespoon of water and about 4 tablespoons of ground flax seeds. I add ground flax seeds to any recipe I can -- you can substitute 3 tablespoons ground flax seeds for 1 tablespoon of oil and it adds lots of nutrition as well. I bought a big bag of flax seeds and I grind them in my coffee grinder. My local supermarket now sells golden flax seeds in their bulk natural foods section.

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