Zucchini Butter

If you grow zucchini (or are a neighbor of someone growing summer squash), chances are good you’re familiar with zucchini butter. It is popular for a reason. You cook a couple pounds of zucchini down, slowly, into a creamy, jammy spread. It freezes nicely, and can be used in endless ways we’ll discuss to make quick meals.

The Origin of Zucchini Butter

I came across the concept of zucchini butter when someone at the community garden pointed me to a version on the Food in Jars site. At first I thought it was going to be a lot of shredded zucchini and herbs worked into actual butter, but no, that wasn’t it. It was cooking zucchini low and slow into a melty fragrant mess of summertime yum. I realized pretty quickly, zucchini butter is not a new thing, but naming it zucchini butter might be. Historically, cooking zucchini in olive oil or butter, making it into various spreads and condiments is a thing, particularly in a number of regional Italian and French cuisines - as well as others, I’m sure. It wasn’t called zucchini butter, it was just how you cook down an abundance of a seasonal ingredient. Julia Child popularized a grated zucchini and shallot recipe, widely cited online as one of the origins of zucchini butter, another version of the technique was highlighted on Food52 as a Genius Recipe. But my sense is that this technique is rooted in grandma and great-grandma cooking, and whatever you end up calling it, it’s a fantastic technique to use up a couple pounds of zucchini. Here’s how I do it.

Favorite Ways to Use Zucchini Butter

I like to cook a pan of zucchini butter and divide it in half. Half goes in the refrigerator, half goes in the freezer.  Here’s how I use the first half:

• Pizza topping: use it on pizzas in place of another sauce.
• Bruschetta: a big smear of zucchini butter a bit of goat cheese and a drizzle of chili crisp is great.
• Work a big scoop into your favorite frittata or omelette.
• A big smear on a toasted English muffin and an egg is the way to start building a breakfast sandwich.
• Add a good amount of grated Parmesan cheese and toss it with pasta for a quick meal.
• Mezze spread: stir some chopped black olives into the zucchini butter and use it in a mezzo situation as a spread for crackers or flatbreads.
• Work half a batch into a pot of risotto.
• As a layer on heirloom tomato sandwiches along with some ripe avocado and fresh basil.

Zucchini Butter: Variations

The zucchini butter you see pictured here is straight-forward with just a little bit of chopped serrano chile pepper added for some kick. But I like to take the concept into a range of directions, and here are a few that have been, arguably, the most successful.

• Herbed Zucchini Butter: Stir fresh herbs in during the last ten minutes of cooking. A couple teaspoons of thyme is one place to start. Or, 1/2 teaspoon of finely chopped rosemary. Or, a handful of well-chopped cilantro (wait to stir this in after you’re finished cooking). Same deal with chopped basil, add after cooking, or even after the zucchini has cooled. And lots of chives are rarely a bad call.
• Citrus Zucchini Butter: Add the zest of a lemon or orange during the last ten minutes of cooking. Finish with a generous drizzle of lemon or other citrus olive oil.
• Spicy Zucchini Butter: As mentioned, above. I like to add some minced serrano pepper. If you want to keep it relatively mild, start with 1/4 or 1/2 of a pepper, and dial it up from there, to your liking.
• Sunshine Zucchini Butter: Use yellow summer squash in place of green zucchini. Stir in a scant 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric powder about half way through the cooking process along with a good amount of freshly ground black pepper. I also like to finish this one with a kiss of lemon olive oil.

Short-cut

There is a shortcut here. You can use grated zucchini to make zucchini butter. And, if you have a grating attachment for your food processor it makes quick work of taking down this much zucchini. It also cooks more quickly into a spreadable texture. I like the more rustic texture you get by cutting the zucchini into tiny cubes, but this a personal preference, and if you want the grated zucchini approach, by all means!

Here's a look (above and below) of the ingredients that go into zucchini butter. You can see how I chop the zucchini and the onions as well. I do a blend of olive oil and butter for the cooking fat.

Cooking Stages

I thought it might be helpful to share photos of the zucchini butter as it cooks down over the hour or so it takes to get to an ideal consistency. 
After 15 minutes (below): you can see that the zucchini is just starting to soften up a bit here.

After 40 minutes (below): You can see that the change is pretty dramatic at this stage but there is still quite a lot of structure in some of the pieces and related to the skin. Keep going! You'll probably need to be addling splashes of water at this point to keep things creamy, and to keep the zucchini from browning.

After one hour (below): This is the stage things really start to collapse, you're getting close to the texture you're after. I went another 10 minutes beyond this to get to the stage you see in the lead photos.

More Zucchini Recipes

• Zucchini Bread
• Pasta with Smashed Zucchini Cream
• Simple Sautéed Zucchini
• Grilled Zucchini & Bread Salad
• Zucchini Gratin
• all zucchini recipes

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