Zucchini bread is great. I've made enough of it this season to prove it. But if your plant is anything like mine, bread alone isn't going to keep up — you need more than one place to put all of it. Here's everything else I do with a zucchini glut besides flour and a loaf pan.
Freeze it shredded
The simplest option, and the one I use most. Shred it, portion it into the amount your favorite bread or muffin recipe calls for, and freeze flat in bags. Future-you gets to bake fresh zucchini bread in January without touching a grater.
Dehydrate it into chips or rounds
Thin rounds or strips, dehydrated until crisp, make a genuinely good snack — and dried zucchini rounds toss straight into winter soups and stews to rehydrate as they cook, no prep required later.
Pickle it like cucumbers
Zucchini takes to a vinegar brine almost as well as cucumbers do. Sliced into spears or rounds and pickled the same way, it's a genuinely good stand-in when you've run out of actual cucumbers but not zucchini.
Turn it into relish
A classic for a reason — shredded zucchini, onion, vinegar, and spices, canned into a sweet-tangy relish that's just as good on a hot dog as any cucumber relish ever was.
Ferment it
Same lacto-fermentation method as my dill pickles, just applied to zucchini spears instead of cucumbers. Salt, water, time, and you've got a tangy, probiotic-rich jar that didn't need a single trip near the stove.
Disguise it as apples
And then there's my favorite trick of the whole list: peeled, chunked, seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg, and canned in a Clear Jel filling exactly the way you'd can real apple pie filling. Open a jar in the middle of winter and it looks, tastes, and bakes up just like apple pie filling — because as far as the recipe's concerned, it basically is. I call it Zapple, and I've got the full Zapple Pie Filling recipe written up if you want to try it yourself.
One quick note: plain zucchini chunks in water alone aren't recommended for canning — there's no tested-safe process for it, mostly a texture and quality issue rather than a hard safety one, but it's the reason you won't see "just canned zucchini" on this list. Freezing, dehydrating, pickling, relish, fermenting, or an acidified filling like Zapple are all the tested, reliable routes.
Between all of these, I genuinely never run out of places to put a zucchini glut anymore. The bread's still my favorite. But it's nice having backup.