Zucchini Bread

Our weekly CSA share fills our fridge with root vegetables, summer squash, berries, and deliciously fresh eggs. The wide variety of produce we get creates a weekly challenge of sorts: how to use all of this food. It has inspired great pizza, a batch of golden beet muffins, crêpes made with the eggs and pastry flour from our share, carrot pancakes, and vegetable salads of every shape and size.
When our share delivered a bounty of zucchini my sister took to making zucchini pasta for lunch - peeling off thin strips of zucchini and topping it with a drizzle of olive oil and some nutritional yeast. She only used the outer layer of the zucchini for the pasta, so before long the leftover zucchinis began to pile up in our vegetable drawer.

With a bag filled with naked zucchinis sitting neglected in the fridge, it seemed like a good time to make zucchini bread. It worked out well because I had been sitting on my hands, just waiting to make a batch of zucchini bread since the spring.
Rewind three months to the night my sister returned from the co-op with a small loaf of zucchini bread made by a local gluten-free bakery. It was deliciously moist, not too sweet, and was made with buckwheat - among other gluten-free flours - giving the loaf a pronounced earthy, slightly bitter, nutty flavor. The buckwheat worked well in the zucchini bread - it blanketed the other flavors without strangling them, giving it a level of sophistication and complexity that set it apart from other zucchini breads and made it truly irresistible. The loaf disappeared far too quickly, leaving me with nothing to do but dream of making a zucchini bread that could fill its place.
So, without further ado: a vegan, gluten-free (provided your oats are confirmed gluten-free) zucchini bread that is rich in flavor and texture, and has just enough buckwheat flour to remind you that this is not your grandmother's zucchini bread.
Unless she makes her's with buckwheat flour too - in that case, hats off to her!

Zucchini Bread
adapted from hell yeah it's vegan
makes two loaves


6 tablespoons ground flax seed
1/2 cup warm water
1 1/2 cups sucanat (or brown sugar)
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup applesauce
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 to 2 1/2 cups grated zucchini (approx. 3 medium ones)
1 1/4 cup oat flour (can be made by blending rolled oats in a food processor)
1 cup brown rice flour
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt


Preheat oven to 350F.
Grease two loaf pans and line with parchment paper (optional but makes them much easier to take out of their pans.)
In a large bowl mix together the ground flax and the warm water. Add the sugar, oil, applesauce and vanilla; beat well. Fold in the the grated zucchini.
In another bowl, whisk together the remaining dry ingredients. Stir the dry mixture into the wet just until incorporated. Divide batter between prepared pans. 
Bake for 50-55 minutes, until a small knife inserted comes out clean. Let cool for a few minutes before slicing.