Lighter zucchini bread perfected over the years

"I love it when you write to me. I really love it when you also share personal recipe favorites," I wrote back in 1993.

Mrs. Julia Arkus from Des Plaines answered the call. She wrote: "This is the season for zucchini … looking at my recipe for the (zucchini) bread. … I could see with the eggs and the oil (it's) not very healthy." She requested my assistance.

Arkus sent me her original recipe on aged, brown paper speckled with oil droplets. I envisioned that recipe sitting on the kitchen counter as she prepared this delight over and over.

That 1993 column recounting my quest to lighten her recipe ended up being a widely read and frequently shared column, especially among folks with an abundance of zucchini creeping out of their gardens.

Eight years ago, and still phobic about fat, I removed all the fats from Arkus' recipe; deleting over 300 fat grams, equal to almost 1½ cups of vegetable oil. At that time, it made me proud to have done so.

I even replaced a cup of pecans with a cup of Grape-Nuts cereal sprinkled over the top. Conceptually clever, but there was no way for cereal to equal pecans when it came down to flavor delivery.

Never having sampled Arkus' original full-fat zucchini bread, I didn't know that my no-added-fat version was probably nothing like her dense, moist, melt-in-your-mouth original.

Over the years, as I continued making Arkus' lightened recipe, I improved on it little each time.

I remained stingy but less ruthless about added fat once I'd learned that small amounts of fat from natural sources, such as an egg yolk, nuts or vegetable oil, produced better tasting results.

My preparation methods also evolved over eight years. I learned, for example, that beating shortening, whether butter or Crisco, drained applesauce and sugar with an electric mixer, produces millions of microscopic air bubbles that the leavening (baking powder or soda) inflate as batter heats in the oven creating lighter textural results.

Today, I match one of the whole eggs in a batter recipe and replace each of the remaining whole eggs with one egg white. Improperly mixing egg whites, due to their high protein content, can toughen a cake or zucchini bread, which means that I now add them near the end of the mixing process, limiting their toughening potential.

Toasting nuts for a brief period in a skillet or in an oven heightens their flavor, allowing you to use fewer nuts to produce strong flavor notes.

Arkus' original recipe called for an 8.25-ounce can of drained, juice-packed pineapple. I've switched to two cans because I really like biting into chunks of pineapple when eating a slice of her bread.

Finally, using a kitchen towel to wring water out of the grated zucchini produced a quick bread with a lighter texture, one I like far better than my first effort.

Again, I end a column with: "My sincere thanks to Mrs. Arkus for sharing this wonderful treat."