Our Turn: Simple Living Alaska's Canned Zucchini Bread

Note: This is not a USDA, nor FDA, approved shelf-safe canning method. Your kitchen, your research, your recipe, your rules.

We are huge fans of Simple Living Alaska. And with 15 zucchini sitting on the counter right now, I’m going to get shredding to reclaim some of that space. It’s only a high of 82 degrees today, so I don’t feel quite so terrible about heating up the house for this endeavor. But I’m sure it will be worth it. Watching Arielle and Eric enjoy this canned bread throughout the year, fried up and toasty… I can’t wait!

Initial review: The bread we baked in a traditional bread pan was perfect. However, the bread baked in the mason jars was pretty oily. We’re going to make more of this soon, but we’ll probably cut the oil in half if we’re pouring into jars!

Here is the recipe she describes in the video. Here is the recipe they used as inspiration before their modifications. Note: The comments section on this Simple Living Alaska video has quite a few comments about botulism concerns. If you use the recipe, and store the jars below 45 degrees, you should be A-OKAY, but, as with anything, do your own homework.

PS- did you know Simple Living Alaska also has a blog?

Arielle’s Canned Zucchini Bread

(yielded 22 wide-mouth pint jars)

Ingredients:

1 cup butter (melted, but not hot)

2 cups coconut oil (melted, but not hot)

~1 cup olive oil (she said she used just a little bit less because of the strong flavor)

6 cups of sugar

8 eggs

4 teaspoons vanilla

1/4 cup applesauce (we don’t have any, so we’re using pumpkin puree)

1 ripe banana (we’re skipping this!)

12 cups shredded zucchini (from 7-9 zucchini)

2 teaspoons salt

4 teaspoons baking powder

4 teaspoons baking soda

4 teaspoons cinnamon

3 teaspoons cocoa powder

10-12 cups flour (depending on desired consistency)

1 cup chopped almonds

1/2 cup chocolate chips (we might accidentally use more)

vinegar for wiping down the jar rim

Directions:

Mix the oils and sugar together. Mix in the eggs and vanilla. Then mix in the applesauce (or pumpkin puree in our case), and banana (if you’re using one). It’s probably best to split into two large bowls here.

Add half of your zucchini shreds to each bowl and mix.

In another bowl, add 6 cups flour and all dry ingredients. Mix well. Add half of dry mix to each bowl of half of the wet mix. Add 2 cups flour to each of the bowls of mix and stir; you’ve added 10 cups flour total to your recipe at this point. If it’s still too runny, add more flour, up to a cup in each bowl, as needed.

Mix in the nuts and chocolate if you haven’t already. Definitely don’t want to forget those goodies.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Arielle lined the sterilized pint jars with coconut oil to help with the bread releasing from the jar, and filled them just over halfway, about to the 10 oz line.

Bake for about 45 minutes, until a toothpick or skewer comes out clean.

Remove one jar from the oven. If bread has risen above the jar rim, slice off the top before cleaning the jar rim. Add a little vinegar to a clean rag, and wipe down the rim of the jar. Add a sterilized lid and ring, tighten the ring all the way, and set aside on towel to cool on the counter. Do this for each jar, one at a time, so that the rim is hot enough to seal.

After 12 hours, and all the lids have popped to indicate a good seal, remove the rings. (This prevents “false sealing” as we’ve warned about before.) We’ll be storing these in the fridge for the time being, and then our freezer, just to be safe.

A quick side note on our food storage. Because we’re only in our first year homesteading, we don’t have all of our infrastructure set up. We have a very deep pantry, but it’s room temperature. We’ve talked about options for a root cellar, or insulated cooling area, but haven’t made it that far yet. When COVID-19 began to spread, lots of people, smartly, went and bought a deep freezer. Unfortunately, we had waited a bit too long to procure this item since we had just spent quite a bit of money on other homestead set-up costs. Long story short, our freezer won’t be here for at least four more weeks. So, until we have the option to freeze some jars, they’re hogging up quite a bit of fridge space. Good news though: this bread is delicious, so we’re, uh, not concerned with saving it for the long haul right now.

In theory, one could look into pressure canning this bread too. Commercial food processing guidelines process low-acid food at 250 degrees for 3 minutes. (Low acid foods are vegetables, meat, legumes and dairy with a pH of 4.6 or above.) We’ll post an update once we give this a test, just to see what happens. This requires more research!