Rustic zucchini buns

Maybe you saw the giant zucchini I posted in my story on IG? It had emerged in our garden while we were 10 days away over the summer. Well, in fact there were 3 big ones, and we gifted the other 2 away as there were no way we’d be able to consume all that. But these soft and nourishing buns are one of my favorite ways to include zucchini in baking. If you’re new to this kind of rustic bun, I’ll suggest you watch my tutorial on IG that I’ve linked to below. It’s utterly simple, you just need a bit of tricks to make it work. And feel free to replace carrots for zucchini for a more classic version.

Ingredients for 10 buns

Dough:

275 ml lukewarm water

25 g yeast

4 tbsp rapeseed oil

2 tsp liquid honey

1 tsp fine salt

200 g white wholewheat flour

300 g all purpose flour

Filling:

50 g sunflower seeds

250 g zucchini, roughly grated and squeezed free of excessive water

1 egg

Directions

In a large bowl, preferrably bowl of stand mixer, dissolve yeast in water. Add the rest of the ingredients for the dough, mix and knead by hand or machine until dough releases from the sides of the bowl/the table. Cover the bowl and leave to rise for an hour.

Scrape dough out onto your flour dusted counter and make a hollow in the dough with your fingers. Place the filling in the hollow. With a table scraper, mix the filling with the dough by scraping dough from the outside and in over the filling. Keep doing until combined. For a visual tutorial on this, please watch my IG video by clicking here.

With your scraper, cut pieces of the dough and lift them onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Leave to rise, covered, for 30 minutes. Bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes, until golden.

They’re at their best on the day of baking.