Cucuzzi Bread

 

It's that time of year when neighbors and friends drop off all kinds of produce from their overgrown gardens. I was the lucky recipient of an overgrown Cucuzzi gourd that Pam was gifted. She had no shame in regifting it to me. 

Unless you are from Italy, you probably have never heard of a Cucuzzi. The seeds came from Sicily and were planted by some friends of Pam. The photo below shows how they grow.

I was going to hang on to it for use as a back scratcher, but I knew it would eventually rot, and that would not be good. The next best thing was to make something out of it - something akin to zucchini bread.

The process of peeling and grating the pieces wasn't as difficult as I imagined. It was large enough to make eight loaves of bread, but I stopped at two.

Daniel, Heidi & Dean came over for dinner tonight so I had some guinea pigs to test it out on. I did not tell them what the star ingredient was. I said they had to wait until this blog post was published to find out.

The good news is that everyone loved this bread! Don said he liked it better than banana bread. Daniel ate three pieces and said it was really delicious. Heidi said it tasted a little like zucchini bread (she was close). Cucuzzi has more moisture than zucchini, so the bread came out more moist. Dean gobbled it up as well. It was a hit! So now I guess I'm going to need some more Cucuzzi in the future. I'm not going to say that too loud though!

Satisfied customer.

Cucuzzi Bread

 

3 cups flour

1 t. salt

1 t. baking soda

1 t. baking powder

1 T. cinnamon

3 large eggs

1 cup vegetable oil (I used olive oil)

2 1/4 c. sugar

1 T. vanilla extract

2 cups Cucuzzi gourd, grated

1 cup chopped walnuts

Grease and flour two bread pans. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Mix dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon) together in a medium bowl using a whisk.

Mix eggs, oil, sugar, and vanilla together in the bowl of a stand mixer.

Add dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

Fold in Cucuzzi and walnuts.

Divide the batter between the two pans and bake 50-60 minutes until a cake tester comes out clean. Let bread cool in pans for 10 minutes then turn out on a cooling rack.