Chocolate Chunk Zucchini Bread

August 21, 2021

This recipe for Chocolate Chunk Zucchini Bread turns out a lightly sweetened zucchini bread loaf with a hint of chocolate here and there.

Surely you’ve made classic zucchini bread before. And you might have even tried my pineapple zucchini bread or my iced lemon zucchini bread. All of those are wonderful. This Chocolate Chunk Zucchini Bread is a little bit different. It’s made with olive oil instead of canola, and it’s lightly sweetened with honey instead of overly so with white and brown sugars.

Sea Salt and Honey

This recipe comes from the book, Sea Salt and Honey by Chloe, Olivia and Nicholas Tsakiris. This author family shares recipes they created in Kardamili, a very small seaside Greek town of 450 residents. I absolutely love that stories of their lives in this town are woven in and around the recipes in the book. It’s an interesting read, and it absolutely transports you to their world in Greece. I love regional, ethnic cookbooks, so this one is a lovely addition to my collection.

Here are a few recipes in the book that have caught my eye:

zucchini chips
gorgonzola Greek yogurt dip
beet and orange salad
savory Greek yogurt bowls
chicken soup with egg, lemon and rice
cauliflower pasta
mushroom and beef broth risotto
lentil chili slow cooked with beer
four mushroom chowder
traditional beef dolmades
hot honey orange chicken
sea salt and honey chocolate chip cookies
fig frozen yogurt

Ingredients needed:

olive oil
baking powder and baking soda
sea salt
cinnamon
honey
egg
Greek yogurt
vanilla extract
zucchini
orange zest
dark chocolate chunks

How to make Chocolate Chunk Zucchini Bread:

Whisk together the dry ingredients in one bowl. In a second bowl, whisk together the honey, olive oil, egg, Greek yogurt and vanilla extract. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, and stir to combine. Fold in shredded zucchini, orange zest and chocolate chunks. Scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Add a few more chocolate chunks to the top, just to make it look prettier when baked!

Bake for 40 to 50 minutes. You want it to be golden brown on top. If it’s browning too quickly, place some foil over the top in the last minutes of baking to prevent from browning too much. Test the center with a knife or a skewer. It should come out clean.

Let your loaf of chocolate chunk zucchini bread cool completely before cutting. You can also save the whole thing for later by wrapping it in foil and then dropping it into a large zip baggie. Freeze for up to 3 months. Alternately, you can cut slices and freeze individual slices for random snacking (or tucking into lunch boxes).

This zucchini bread is delicious! The authors called for a little less honey and chocolate in their recipe, so I bumped up the honey and chocolate amounts slightly. It still isn’t overly sweet, and we liked it very much. There is a hint of orange flavor from the orange zest that comes with each bite. It’s a nice pairing with the chocolate in the bread. We love it almost as much as the Raspberry Dark Chocolate Banana Bread that we make so often. It’s definitely a nice change of pace from making classic banana bread. Enjoy!