Natural Food Dye

Dying your Easter Or Ostara eggs does not have to be a chemical filled adventure. You can make very pretty food derived dyes at home that are safe to color your food with.
We are going to look at making:
Blue- from cabbage leaves
Purple- from cabbage leaves
orange- from paprika
yellow- from turmeric

The first one is Blue, to make a blue food dye chop up about a 1/4 of a large head of purple cabbage. boil it.

when the water level starts to drop you can add more or feel free to boil it down to a more concentrated blue the less water the darker the color you will get. when the leaves have started to fad all there color and you have the desired amount of water left strain into a glass or black ceramic bowl.

This blue liquid will stain most anything so wear a apron. That is all for the blue dye, add it by drop do rice or drop a boiled egg already peeled right into it to get a blue egg that is fun and safe to eat.

To make the purple dye will are going to use a glass measuring cup and scoop out some of the blue dye into a different glass bowl. then we will add one tsp. yes only 1 teaspoon of white vinegar. start stirring and watch the magic.

 you will now have a purple dye, you can add more or less vinegar to get the shade that you desire.
The purple dye is not as strong as the blue and so more will be needed to color food, or a egg will have to sit longer in it then the blue.

Next is orange, to make a orange dye we will use paprika. In a glass bowl add about two cups water and five tablespoons of paprika. put in the microwave for 5-8 minutes until it has boiled for a while and pulled some color out of the paprika. Next you will want to strain out the Paprika from the water.
you will be left with a red/orange dye. you can try less water and more paprika or boiling it longer to see if you can change the color.

Last but  not least is Yellow from Turmeric This dye will stain EVERY THING.
It is the same method as the Paprika, just add to water and boil in a glass bowl, unfortunately for me I was out of glass bowls at this point and a black one did not take good pictures so i used what was once a white plastic bowl and is now yellow. After boiling you will need to strain out the Turmeric.

The resulting yellow dye will dye fast and go a long ways

It will look orange because of the concentration but it will color things yellow.

All of these dyes can be kept in the fridge for about a week. but warm them back up before you use them because they work best that way.

To see a example of some of the colors check out my next post where I will be making cute little blue bunny's and yellow chicks out of eggs for my sons preschool class.