This Chocolaty Zucchini Bread Is So Good, I Make It All Summer Long

If you have friends, family or neighbors with gardens, it’s possible that someone has “gifted” you a zucchini—and if not, they will soon. And when they do, I highly recommend that you make this zucchini bread recipe.

More than a decade ago, I had just harvested several massive zucchini from our garden. I sliced and grilled the smaller ones and then folded them into cooked rigatoni along with cherry tomatoes, cubes of mozzarella and homemade pesto. I made our Test Kitchen manager’s mom’s recipe for super-simple sautéed zucchini with Parmesan to serve alongside grilled chicken. I made a frittata for breakfast. Even after those three meals, I felt like I hadn’t even made a dent in my harvest.

So I took to the internet to look for a new zucchini bread recipe. While I already add chocolate chips to my loaves pretty regularly, a recipe rich with cocoa powder caught my eye. Quite honestly it looked like a loaf of chocolate cake, which sounded delicious. I decided to give it a try.

Since the recipe wasn’t an EatingWell recipe, it had kind of a ridiculous amount of sugar. While sugar isn’t bad, consuming too much added sugar has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Even though sugar is important to the success of baked goods (it contributes to the moistness and texture), my intuition told me I could successfully reduce it—so I did. It also had a generous amount of cinnamon in the mix, which gave the loaf more nuance. My husband and I devoured the loaf in less than a day.

We loved that chocolate zucchini bread so much that I turned to it every year. Sometimes I made it in a cake pan and slathered it with frosting (chocolate and cream cheese were both delicious). I baked the batter into muffins to tuck into our lunchboxes for work and school, freezing what we didn’t eat in a few days for emergency snacks.

Fast forward to 2023. Our associate food editor and I were coming up with a new batch of recipe ideas to have developed. We knew zucchini season would be here soon enough. We should do a zucchini bread recipe, we said. As we looked at the different recipes we had—from Lemon Zucchini Bread to dried cranberry–studded Zucchini Bread—it came to me. We should make over the chocolate–chocolate chip zucchini bread recipe I make every year. 

I’m happy to introduce your new favorite zucchini bread: Chocolate Zucchini Bread. It’s not only my favorite (while we did leave out the cinnamon, I do usually add a generous teaspoon when I make it), it’s been a hit with our readers too. In Joy Lizabeth Almond’s review, she said, “Love this bread. I have made it several times, and it is always moist and a hit.” An anonymous reviewer said, “I have made this and OMG absolutely amazing and delicious.” 

But I think Laura Hanson really hit it on the head when she said, “The sweetness is subtle and lets the cocoa flavor shine.” I totally agree. Like I said, sugar is essential to the texture of baked goods, but it also tastes, well, sweet. I can hear you saying to yourself, well, obviously. But sometimes too much sugar just overpowers the other flavors in a dessert or baked good. But not in this recipe—this bread is super chocolaty, with subtle grassy notes from plenty of shredded zucchini. 

Whether you bake up a loaf with a gift zucchini or one from the grocery store or farmers’ market, I know you’ll love it as much as I do. And if you do wake up one morning with a massive zucchini on your porch, you could make a couple of loaves and drop one on the porch of your zucchini gift giver. After all, who doesn’t love the gift of good food?