That’s “lime & green tomato”, not “lime-green tomato”.
Unlike every other on-line recipe page on the planet, I’m going to give you the recipe first, then yak about it afterwards.
Citrus and green tomato zucchini bread.
Ingredients:
- 3 cups shredded, drained green tomatoes
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1.5 cups granulated sugar
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 3 eggs
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 3 teaspoons vanilla
- Zest of one or two limes (or lemons)
- 1.5 tablespoons lime juice (or lemon juice)
Optional add-in, one cup of:
- chocolate chips OR
- chopped nuts OR
- blueberries
Glaze:
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 3 tablespoons lime (or lemon) juice
This is the zucchini bread recipe from Love and Lemons, with two modifications. If you need instructions on how to bake zucchini bread, see that website.
Modification 1: Substitute shredded, drained green tomatoes for the zucchini in the original recipe. I tossed the washed and roughly chopped green tomatoes into the food processor, pulsed it a few times, and let the results sit for a few minutes in a colander. Normally, you wouldn’t drain the shredded vegetable, but shredded green tomatoes were obviously far too wet to be used as a direct substitute for shredded zucchini without draining them first.
Modification 2: Replace the cinnamon in the original recipe with the citrus flavorings from Two Peas & Their Pod. Add the zest of one or two limes (or lemons), plus 1.5 tablespoons of lime (or lemon) juice, to the zucchini bread batter. And, once the bread has cooled, make citrus glaze by whisking three tablespoons of lime (or lemon) juice into two cups of powdered sugar. Follow the directions for that as outlined in Two Peas & Their Pod.
I currently own about 15 pounds of green tomatoes. The tomatoes are the result of a mistake, planting my late-season tomatoes about two weeks too late.
Back in Post G23-065, I reviewed all the known savory or sweet options for cooking with green tomatoes. As a byproduct of that search, it appeared that any way you might normally hide zucchini in food would also work for green tomatoes. Hence, among the many uses for green tomatoes, any zucchini bread recipe is fair game.
I chose the most zucchini-efficient recipe for zucchini bread. The whole point of this is to use up a vegetable surplus. I went looking for the recipe that had the highest ratio of zucchini to flour and sugar. Those ratios are shown at the bottom of the spreadsheet above. The Love and Lemons recipe was the most zucchini-efficient among the first half-dozen to show up via Google Search.
But I also have a box of limes, from a potted lime tree that needs to come inside for the cold weather. (Above, lower left.) So when I stumbled across a lemon zucchini bread recipe, it seemed like a match made in heaven. I substituted the citrus flavoring from that recipe, for the more traditional pumpkin-spice-type flavorings from the base recipe, and added the citrus glaze as well. All, using limes instead of lemons.
The results are excellent. It’s a moist cake, not too dense, not too sweet, with a pronounced and lingering citrus zing to it.
Don’t skip the glaze. So says Maria Lichty, the author of the Two Peas & Their Pod website. And she’s right. The glaze is NOT optional. It adds needed sweetness and extra citrus zing to the recipe.
In the end, with the glaze, this mash-up of two recipes is not as sugar-efficient as I had originally planned. But it’s delicious.
In particular, if somebody told me that was made with green tomatoes, I flat-out wouldn’t believe it. There’s clearly something a little different about the cake, but it’s hard to pin down. And that’s a good thing.
Anyway, if you find yourself with green tomatoes, give this recipe a try. It’s a keeper.
All credit to the original authors. The stroke of genius here is Lichty’s decision to convert the traditional pumpkin-spice-style zucchini bread into a lemon cake. My only value-added is substituting shredded drained green tomatoes for zucchini. And even that isn’t original, I saw somebody do that on-line.
And to my wife. I prepped the ingredients, but she’s the baker in the family. So after the grating/draining/zesting/squeezing, my contribution was to get out of her way and let her do her thing without my “help”.
