2025 Zucchini Adventures - Part 1

I am starting a series on our adventures with our zucchini from our garden this year. We have some experiments going on and I think it will be very interesting to see how it turns out in the end; so come along, join in on your own experiments, or teach us your methods and ways, so we can learn and grow together!

This year we got a late start again on our garden, we did not get our plants into the ground until mid May, most of which we bought from the store as plants already, including out zucchini. I wanted to plant extra this year, so we could make our own zucchini flour. No additives, just pure, dried, and ground up zucchini. A carb friendly alternative to regular flour, and who wouldn't want a guilt free and healthy chocolate cake?!

Our first harvest day of zucchini just happened to be June 27th, Miss Alaska's birthday, and every day we have gotten right around 13 zucchini, some times more and sometimes less. As of today (July 11th, 2025) we have harvested 197 zucchini from only 31 plants, we aren't even in their prime time of harvesting yet!

Every couple of days we, using a hand crank veggie/cheese grater, grate up enough zucchini to fill a plastic tub we got for butchering (6" deep, 14" wide, and 19" long). We put in a cooling rack used for baking in the bottom and line it with cheese cloth, then place the grated zucchini in the tub and let it sit overnight. This allows quite a bit of the moisture to naturally drain off without our produce sitting in it.

The next day we spread out a decently thick layer of zucchini shreds onto our dehydrator racks that are lined with parchment paper. We set the dehydrator to run over night anywhere from 12 to 18 hours. It just depends on what time of day we are starting it and what time of day the following day we will be able to get to it, we add more time if that is needed, sometimes our layers are a little thick, to make sure we completely get the tub emptied into the dehydrator! That was a bit of a trial and error process, just trying to see what type of capacity our dehydrator could hold, as well as the temperature and time it took.

Once the zucchini breaks and crumbles easily we are able to take it out and use the food processer to grind it down into a powder. So far we have found that the food processer alone does not get it into a fine enough powder, so we are going to try using a coffee grinder after the food processer on the next round we do to see if that makes a difference. We discovered this when we made fresh, homemade loaves of zucchini bread and it was a little grainy and did not seem to hold together very well. We totally forgot to get pictures though because we were too busy eating it, it was fantastic. Since we used fresh grated zucchini and the zucchini flour (which is potent in smell by the way) it made for a very strong flavorful loaf of bread. 10/10 recommend adding chocolate chips and walnuts if you don't have any nut allergies!

It is hard to say just how many zucchini it takes to make "x" amount of flour given there are different sizes of vegetable, but for this trial round we grated 28 zucchini and it resulted in 2.5 cups of flour. Come back for Part 2, I will be discussing a smaller part of an experiment we did in the first round as well. Until next time, be blessed!

-Dakota