The Craftiest Workshop

I planted eight containers with zucchini seeds this spring in the house. All of them sprouted and I ended up planting all eight into the garden. After some cooler weather after May long weekend, a few of them died off. Another couple seemed to die after a big windstorm that we had. In the end, I ended up with three healthy zucchini plants.

Two weeks ago I picked two large zucchini.

One of them I cut into four inch pieces to make stuffed zucchini. Basically you core out each piece, fry up some ground beef, onion, garlic, Parmesan cheese and the chopped zucchini center and stuff each piece. I topped mine with some pasta sauce and cheese then baked it for 45 min at 350°. It was yummy.

The second zucchini I shredded into 1 and 2 cup amounts and froze in baggies for baking. I should have mentioned a large food processor in my last post. It saves a lot of time when processing vegetables for the freezer or making relish.

This week I had another two large zucchini about the same size as last week. I picked one to dehydrate for flour. I took off the skin (DO NOT DO THIS) and then I used a vegetable peeler to get strips of zucchini. I didn’t realize that zucchini sends out sap through the cut part of the zucchini which really dries out the skin. The hand I was holding the peeled zucchini in looked like this after.

I filled the dehydrator with about 2/3 of the zucchini. I decided to just shred the rest in my food processor and freeze for soup. I would say, cut this way, all you would need would be a zucchini the size that they sell in grocery stores to fill the dehydrator.

It took about 5 hours in the dehydrator at 131°.

The zucchini was really stuck on the tray in some places and it was almost sticky to the touch. It tasted sweet like fruit does after dehydration. Some of it I couldn’t even get off the tray.

I took the strips and put them in my small food processor. After blending for a long time, I got this consistency. The amount was somewhere between 1/4-1/3 of a cup. Not exactly flour but small enough that it wouldn’t be noticed in a baking recipe.

For the next zucchini, I decided to cut it into slices about 1/4” thick. This saved my hand from peeling (just hold the slices on the edges) and used up more of the height space of the dehydrator. It took longer to dry but I got more onto the trays. I only used three of the five trays.

It took 10 hours at 140° to dry.

I tried to use my larger food processor but it really didn’t work to break down the pieces. I went back to my 2 cup processor. The result was still not the consistency of flour. The amount I ended up with was 1/2-2/3 of a cup.

While it was still fresh, I decided to use some in a recipe. This was a “new to me recipe” that I decided to try because we were out of cookies and I had frozen zucchini now. I wrote out the recipe as I found it so forgive the order of ingredients. For those of you that are not bakers, beat together the sugars, butter, egg, vanilla and sift together the dry ingredients. Combine and fold in the zucchini and choc chips. I substituted the suggested 1/3 of the flour for my zucchini flour.

The result was a cookie the consistency of cake. I drained my zucchini in a colander but did not dab with a paper towel so perhaps that would have helped. Even though the finished product wasn’t really a cookie, it was delicious. I have never tasted a better flavour in a double chocolate cookie. To be fair, I did open a new container of cocoa so maybe that added to the flavour.

This process of dehydrating zucchini reminded me of the shucking wheat experiment or cleaning rosehips. It is a lot of work for not a lot of reward. That being said, if we have another global pandemic or a National railway strike (oh yeah that is happening now) limiting the ability to buy flour, I would consider zucchini flour a tasty option to make my flour go farther.

If I ever find a good deal on a coffee grinder, I would like to try it to see if it could get the zucchini finer. My food processors just aren’t cutting it. I didn’t try the magic bullet but I had recently used it to blend dehydrated Haskaps into berry powder and the consistency was about the same.

Apparently you can also make flour from cattail heads and sunflower stalks. We have both so I will likely try it and write about it in a future post.

So, all in all, if I have freezer space, I will likely choose freezing shredded zucchini over dehydrating it for flour. That being said, I am glad that I had enough zucchini on hand to try it and know that it would work if I am ever in a pinch in the future.