Gluten-Free Zucchini Cheese Bread

This gluten-free zucchini cheese bread is a simple quick bread recipe. Moist, and bursting full of onions and cheese flavor, it’s the perfect summer savory treat!

What’s the easiest vegetable to grow? You can grow a lot of easy summer vegetables, but zucchini has to sop the list! And it’s easy to have so much you don’t know what to do with it all. If you’re a small family like us, it doesn’t take much to have too much either. 

Last summer we grew mostly yellow summer squash instead of zucchini, but the two are pretty much interchangeable. For instance, you can easily turn these summer squash pickles into zucchini pickles. 

But for pretty much everything – even if it’s just a simple stir fry – I have to admit that I really prefer zucchini over yellow squash. Maybe it’s the color – gluten-free zucchini bread just isn’t the same without the green flecks showing – or maybe the flavor’s just a bit different. 

Anyway, we have been enjoying our fair share of the aforementioned zucchini stir-fry, and zucchini bread, as well as zucchini streusel muffins, zucchini brownies, and even zucchini pancakes.

And this gluten-free zucchini cheese bread. Zucchini isn’t all about sweet breads and muffins! Summer zucchini soup is a hit too, and I can make a mean zucchini frittata for breakfast. 

But, I’d wager this recipe is a little bit different than zucchini recipes you made in the past, so let me tell you about it. 

Are you familiar with cheddar bay biscuits? You know the ones served at Red Lobster, and that you can buy a mix for to make your own? 

They’re so good right? This bread is similar. It has that same cheddar and onion flavor, with a crusty, crunchy crust that is just to die for. 

(btw, if you’re looking for a gluten-free savory biscuit, we love these gluten-free ham and cheddar biscuits!)

I originally found this recipe on Closet cooking, and knew I had to adapt it to be gluten-free, because my husband, who has a wheat allergy, would love it. 

It was surprisingly easy to adapt, and I only made a few changes, really. 

Gluten-Free Zucchini Cheese Bread

• The first one was changing the sour cream to greek yogurt. One of the things most commonly lacking in gluten-free baked goods is protein. We tend to add a lot of starch to our flour mixes, and use fairly low protein flours (compared to wheat). While using a fatty ingredient like sour cream would normally be a good idea to help keep your bread from drying out, the zucchini would already be doing this, plus there’s plenty of fat between the butter and the cheese. So adding some protein back for a more structured load works best here. 
  
  
•  Another change I made was with the leavening agents. I chose to use 100% baking powder rather than the baking soda mix as I’ve had better success with that in gluten-free quick breads and muffins. 
  
  
• And of course, the other big change is the flour. In the pictures you see, I used LiveGFree pancake and baking mix (I’ve linked to it, so you can see it but definitely buy it in store at Aldi where’s 1/4 the price) with 2 Tablespoons of the flour substituted for 2 Tablespoons of cornstarch. However, this recipe isn’t super picky. Our favorite homemade gluten-free flour mix works as well, and you could likely substitute your own favorite high-quality gluten-free flour mix. 

 

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