Scared Of Food Dye? Use These Natural Alternatives Instead
Let’s face it: lately, we’ve all been freaking out a little about artificial food dye. Whether we’re pouring over lists of foods containing now-banned Red Dye No. 3 (maraschino cherries? Swedish fish?!) or eying the rainbow sprinkles on our friend’s birthday cake with paranoid suspicion, most of us are thinking twice about consuming anything with unnaturally vibrant colors.
But that doesn’t mean we have to completely give up on brightly frosted cookies and brilliantly dyed Easter eggs. Before the creation of Red Dye No. 3 and all its crazy chemical cousins, all-natural food dyes dominated the color palette of the culinary world—and we can still use their vibrancy today to tint everything from cocktails to cake frosting.
I took a dive into some of the most popular all-natural color sources to find out which give you what color (sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s not!) and how you can best extract that color and use it in your kitchen. Here are seven of my favorite natural dyes.
Freeze-Dried Strawberries (Pink)
Often available in grocery and convenience stores, freeze-dried strawberries are easily one of the most accessible natural food dyes. They’re also one of the easiest to use in your kitchen: simply grind them in the food processor—or crush to a fine powder in a plastic bag—to create a powder that you can easily stir into frostings or cake batters. Depending on the other flavors you’re working with, you might be able to taste the strawberry a bit, so this dye is best used where you don’t mind a faint fruitiness. Also, it’s important to note that freeze-dried strawberries will never give you a super deep pink hue, rather, they give those “pretty-in-pink” vibes. For a darker pink, see below!
Beets (Red)
Beets top my “foods-to-wear-gloves-while-prepping” list simply because they’ll stain my fingers in two seconds flat. The good news? They’re equally efficient at staining—err, DYEING—anything else. In this case, the best way to get that gorgeous magenta is to simmer peeled and cut beets in a little water until it’s tinted deep pink, then remove the beets and continue to simmer the water until most of it has evaporated, leaving you with a small amount of liquid that holds that deeply concentrated color. From there, you can stir your coloring into everything from cocktails to frostings, and you can even add a little vinegar to it and use it to dye eggs.
Butterfly Pea Tea (Blue/Purple)
Derived from a Southeast Asian flower, butterfly pea tea has been used for centuries as a medicinal tea and a (somewhat) magical food dye ranging in color from deep blue to purple. Infused into a liquid with a neutral or basic PH, such as water, it will produce a beautiful deep blue dye. If the liquid is acidic, the dye will be purple! As with beets, the best way to extract the color in butterfly pea tea is to simmer the flowers in water until the color is highly concentrated. Just be aware that if you’re trying to color a cake batter that’s, say, flavored with lemon, the cake may end up purple instead of blue!
Purple Cabbage (Purple/Blue)
Purple cabbage must also be infused into liquid to extract its color. Just like the butterfly pea tea, it can provide multiple colors, depending on the PH of that liquid. In this case, the purple cabbage naturally produces a purple dye, but the addition of a basic ingredient (such as baking soda) will turn it blue. Due to the potential metallic flavor that baking soda can give off, I recommend opting for butterfly pea tea if you’re looking to achieve blue coloring, rather than doctoring purple cabbage juice!
Turmeric (Yellow)
Another ingredient that excels at staining hands is turmeric, which is a great, easily accessible option to get a concentrated yellow color. While you can certainly boil the peeled turmeric root just like with the beets to get that vibrant color, the easiest way is to stir a little ground turmeric directly into whatever batter or liquid you’re trying to tint. Or, if you want to dye easter eggs, simply dissolve the turmeric into the vinegar and water mixture. Just keep in mind that turmeric can carry a specific earthy, savory flavor, depending on how much is used!
Matcha (Pale Green)
For a beautiful pastel green, look no further than matcha tea. Now available at many mainstream supermarkets as well as specialty stores, powdered matcha stirs easily into liquids, batters, and frostings. Its color isn’t as potent as turmeric or beets, so you may have to add a little more to get a stronger color—and you might also start to taste some of those inherent grassy flavors. If you’d prefer to avoid that, the next option might be better.
Spinach (Darker Green)
For a more vibrant shade of green, spinach is the best way to go. It takes a little more effort to extract the color here—unless you’re buying powdered spinach, which is apparently a thing! If you’re working with fresh greens, you’ll need to puree them with a little water in a food processor, strain that puree through a fine mesh sieve into a pot, and then reduce the liquid down to concentrate the color... which seems like a lot of work. If you can source the powder, it might be worth it!
A final note about dyeing:
If you’re tinting frostings, batters, or cocktails, any of these concentrated dyes can be stirred directly into the substance you’d like to color. If you’d like to use them to dye Easter eggs naturally, you’ll want to make sure to add vinegar to the colored solutions before attempting to dye. Without getting too crazy scientific, the vinegar primes the dye to be absorbed by the shell. Unless you remember to stir it in, all you’ll have is damp eggs.
What are your favorite natural dyes? Let us know in the comments below.
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