Chef John’s Secret to the Best Zucchini Bread—No Matter the Recipe

It’s all in the prep work.

It’s zucchini season, and that means home cooks are using the abundance to make a variety of zucchini-focused dishes, and zucchini bread is often at the top of their recipe lists. The beauty of zucchini bread is that it uses up three or four whole zucchini in a quick bread that everyone loves.

It has a slight vegetal flavor, but doesn’t scream, “I’m vegetable bread.” It takes on the warm flavors of the baking spices added to the batter, and it’s melt-in-your-mouth moist. Sometimes, excess moisture can be an issue, in which case there’s an easy step to ensure your zucchini bread is never too moist.

Allrecipes’ Chef John recommends using the “salt the zucchini first” trick that removes both excess moisture and any bitterness that may be in the zucchini, particularly if you’re using larger zucchini.

How to Salt Zucchini to Remove Excess Moisture

After you’ve grated the zucchini for your bread (we recommend using a box grater or the shredding blade in a food processor), here’s what to do. This works for any zucchini bread recipe, not just Chef John’s version.

1. Add the grated zucchini to a bowl with about one tablespoon of kosher salt. Let sit for 10 minutes.

2. Transfer the salted zucchini to a strainer and rinse it thoroughly under cold water. This will remove the salt.

3. Leave the strainer over a bowl or in a clean sink for 15 to 20 minutes so the zucchini will drain any excess moisture.

You can then proceed to make any zucchini bread recipe as written. The zucchini will still have enough water to make the bread perfectly moist, but not soggy. You can use this trick for zucchini cake and muffins, too.

More Zucchini Bread Tips

Once you have the moisture issue taken care of, zucchini bread is pretty tough to get wrong, but if you’re looking for more zucchini bread tips, we have them:

• Cut the ends off the zucchini, but there’s no need to peel them.

• Seeds or no seeds? You don’t need to remove the seeds from small and medium-sized zucchini, but if you’re using a large zucchini (you know, the one that probably hid under a leaf in the garden until it was a foot and a half long), scoop the seeds out before shredding.

• Mix the ingredients until they are all just incorporated, but don’t over-mix.

Our readers love Chef John’s zucchini bread recipe. “All my friends raved and asked for the recipe,” commented mas. And an anonymous commenter said, “The cayenne pepper was brilliant! Really gave it a special zing!”

Some of our readers left tips in the comment section for ways to switch up the recipe, too:

• Use equal parts grated zucchini and grated carrot—no need to remove moisture from the carrots (from 4dbates).

• Substitute chocolate chips for the walnuts (from anonymous).

• The recipe has no salt (except for what’s used when draining the zucchini), so if you’d like to add a little salt, use salted butter instead of unsalted (from CT_Jenn).

• Bake mini loaves, wrap them well, and freeze them for holiday gifts. They’re still moist by the end of the year (from L Massey).

• Substitute chopped pecans for the walnuts (from Carolyn Sapio).

• Swap out blueberries for walnuts (from foodie_gardener).