Cardamom and Tea

zero-waste zucchini bread

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A few days ago, I posted a recipe for dolm’it koosa, or zucchini dolma. This old family recipe is perfect in every way, except that it leaves you with an unreasonable pile of zucchini guts. In fact, I think you end up carving away more zucchini than you actually end up using for the dolma. Most people usually find a way to put this precious zucchini pulp to use—my grandmother always sautées it with onions and serves it as a side veggie, and I recently learned about zucchini butter, which is now at the top of my to do list. But zucchini bread has always been my tried and true way of using up leftover zucchini guts.

In fact, zucchini bread is such a leftover-zucchini magnet, I don’t think I’ve ever actually intentionally baked a loaf. In late summer, generous gardening friends will usually post on facebook about how they’re just drowning in zucchini, begging for people to stop by and take some off their hands (while all of us lacking green thumbs and back yards roll our eyes in jealousy, while commenting “yes please!”), and many recipes besides dolma call for scraping out the insides before sautéeing, grilling, or spiralizing. There just always seems to be extra zucchini around.

So this recipe keeps with the spirit of not letting perfectly good zucchini go to waste. I’ve calibrated it to use up all the zucchini scraps from one batch of my zucchini dolma. But this recipe is so good, it actually wouldn’t be totally crazy to go to the store just to pick up ingredients to bake a couple loaves. Or maybe it’s more about reversing the causation… go to the store, buy eight Lebanese zucchini, core them, use the guts to make zucchini bread, and then make dolma with all those leftover zucchini shells you’ve got just lying around. Someone’s trash is another’s treasure!

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zero-waste zucchini bread

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  • Prep Time: 25 minutes
  • Total Time: 2 hours
  • Yield: 2 medium loaves

Ingredients

prepping the zucchini guts:

  • 2 pounds of zucchini guts (from 1 batch of dolm’it koosa) *
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

baking the zucchini bread:

  • 2 cups wrung-out grated zucchini
  • 1 cup olive oil (not extra virgin)
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
  • 3/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 4 cups sifted flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 cup chopped walnuts
  • 1/2 cup raisins

Instructions

  1. Prepping the zucchini guts: Grate the zucchini using a food processor’s grater attachment. If you don’t have a food processor, very thinly slice the zucchini guts and then coarsely chop the thin slices (it’s very hard to grate these by hand with a box grater).
  2. Combine the zucchini with the 1/2 teaspoon salt and let it sit for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, let the water drain away and then wring the zucchini out using your hands or a clean kitchen towel. Once all is said and done, you should have about 2 cups of wrung-out, grated zucchini (a little more or less is just fine).
  3. Baking the zucchini bread: Preheat the oven to 350° F.
  4. Butter 2 8×4 inch loaf pans. **
  5. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the wrung-out zucchini, olive oil, eggs, sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, and salt, and whisk together until the whole thing is completely incorporated.
  6. In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, walnuts, and raisins.
  7. Add the wet mixture to the flour mixture and stir to combine. Do not over-mix (stop mixing as soon as there are no large lumps of flour).
  8. Divide the mixture evenly between the loaf pans.
  9. Bake for about 1 hour. Start checking for doneness after about 50 minutes, by inserting a toothpick or wooden skewer into the center of the loaf. If it comes out with batter, it needs more time, but if it comes out with just some crumbs, it’s ready to take out.
  10. Remove from the pan and cool on a rack or clean, unscented kitchen towel for at least 30 minutes before cutting and serving.

Notes

* The idea with this recipe is to use the guts of the zucchini left over from making dolma, but you can of course just use 2 pounds of whole zucchini. The amount of guts left over from one batch of my dolm’it koosa should be exactly enough for this recipe (assuming you core them thinly enough).

** If your pan isn’t nonstick (or is very scratched-up nonstick), make parchment slings for easy removal (butter the pan, place the sling, and add more butter to the parchment). Simply trace a butter knife around the bare sides and lift it out with the parchment flaps.

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zucchini dolma | dolm’it koosa

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My grandmother loves to remember the way they preserved food on their farm in Syria. Just as our ancestors had done for centuries, they combined cheese with caraway seeds, and buried it under ground in clay jars. Her father was a carpenter, so they put grapes up in sealed crates of sawdust. And at the end of the summer, they would harvest their zucchini crop, core them, thread them with twine, and hang them to dry for winter dolma.

While you might think of dolma as one particular kind of dish (your mind might go to grape leaves in particular), it’s actually a very broad category of stuffed produce. And that’s the key quality that unites every variety: dolma absolutely must be stuffed. But it can be stuffed with anything from lemony rice to herby or spicy meat, and it most often contains some combination of the two, plus a few other flavorful ingredients. The shell can be just about anything, including (and certainly not limited to) tomato, cabbage, swiss chard, apple, potato, onion, grape leaves, eggplant, and zucchini. If you can core it or roll it, someone has probably made dolma of it. Some pots of dolma contain a lot of different veggies jumbled together, which creates an incredibly complex dish whose flavors all meld together, while some pots of dolma specialize in one particular veggie, for a more focused and clear flavor (in this case, zucchini).

One key to making great dolma is to find a pot that’s the right size for your batch, so that the braising liquid reaches at least halfway up their sides. In other words, you don’t want a couple grape leaves or stuffed zucchini floating around in a big pool of liquid. This is one reason that making dolma in a gigantic batch, without a recipe just makes sense. When my family makes dolma, we normally throw together a huge heap of stuffing, then we stuff everything until the pot is full, and pour liquid in the pot to the right level. But if you’re making dolma for the first time, it’s a lot easier if you have a recipe that takes all this into consideration for you and guides you through making a modest amount.

I’ve tested this recipe several times (as always), to make sure the proportion of stuffing, zucchini, and braising liquid is correct, so that you don’t end up with leftover zucchini or stuffing at the end. As long as you find a pot that fits them all as snugly as possible, your dolma will turn out perfectly. However, these photos are from a batch I made where I probably could have squeezed one or two more dolma in. But as long as you let them slump a little to one side (as in the photos below), you’ll be just fine. I thought about retaking these photos with the perfectly tetrised batch I made the other day, but I thought it was more important to illustrate that everything will turn out just fine either way.

more dolma

my Assyrian vegan stuffed grape leaves
Maureen Abood’s Lebanese stuffed zucchini
Makos’ meatless Greek stuffed vegetables
Saveur‘s Armenian stuffed cabbage

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zucchini dolma | dolm’it koosa

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  • Prep Time: 1 hour
  • Total Time: 2 hours
  • Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

To prep the zucchini:

  • 8 large Lebanese zucchini *
  • Special equipment: zucchini corer **
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

To stuff the dolma:

  • 1 cup green onions
  • 3/4 cup parsley
  • 3/4 cup dill
  • 3/4 cup cilantro
  • 1/4 cup minced, seeded hot peppers (from about 1 banana pepper)
  • 4 cloves garlic, crushed through a press or finely minced
  • 28 ounce can diced tomatoes, strained, juice reserved
  • 2 tablespoons melted butter
  • 1 cup uncooked medium grain rice, rinsed (e.g., Calrose)
  • 3/4 pound sirloin, minced
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, plus more to taste
  • 1 medium potato, sliced thinly
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Instructions

  1. Preparing the zucchini: Cut each zucchini in half (into 2 shorter pieces), and then core the zucchinis, *** leaving the uncut side closed. Core them so that the zucchini shell is very thin (see photos). I do this by gouging out 3 big circles from the middle, and then using the side of the zucchini corer to whittle the insides down until they’re the right thickness.
  2. Evenly sprinkle the carved insides with 1/4 teaspoon salt. Let them sit for about 30 minutes and then pour out and discard the water that’s collected inside them. You can even do this step the night before, and let them brine in the fridge overnight.
  3. Making the dolma: Combine the green onions, parsley, dill, cilantro, hot peppers, garlic, strained diced tomatoes (but save the juice for later), melted butter, rice, sirloin, and salt.
  4. Spread the potato slices over the bottom of a medium dutch oven or stockpot.
  5. Stuff the zucchinis with the filling and place them vertically in the dutch oven. If it isn’t a snug fit, let them lean to the side slightly, so that there aren’t any big gaps. ****
  6. Slowly pour the reserved tomato juice directly over the tops of the stuffed zucchinis (some of it will seep into the stuffing and some will overflow down the sides). Next do the same with the lemon juice. Then pour the water through a gap between the zucchinis. Drizzle the extra virgin olive oil over the tops to finish.
  7. Place the pot over medium-high heat. As soon as it starts to boil, reduce the heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer for 50 minutes. You should maintain a good simmer, not a bare one; it should be as close to a boil as possible, without making the dolma bounce around too much.
  8. Once 50 minutes are up, keep it covered, and let them rest for about 15 to 20 minutes, or longer.
  9. Uncover and serve.

Notes

* Any other variety will work fine, but you might have extra stuffing or zucchini left. Lebanese zucchini are also known as Korean zucchini. Look for zucchini that are approximately 8 inches long and 2 inches wide.

** You can easily find zucchini corers online, and in some Middle Eastern grocery stores. In addition to making dolma, they can be used for lots more. For instance, cut a cucumber in half and then cut a small slice off each end so they can stand up on their own, core the inside (leaving the bottom closed), salt it lightly, and fill it with water (my grandmother would make these for us all the time when we were children). Use a zucchini corer as part of your jack-o-lantern tool kit around Halloween. Use one to core and stuff mini-cupcakes.

*** If you’re looking for a way to use up the leftover zucchini guts, try my recipe for zero waste zucchini bread.

**** The key here is to get them to fit snugly, so you need to choose the right size pot. If you only have a gigantic stockpot / dutch oven, just increase the recipe accordingly.

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