I’m intrigued with dyes in nature. It’s the good stuff…green spinach and kale, pomegranate that dyes our fingers red when we pry those seeds out and anti-oxidant-rich blueberries. This year, we are in the kitchen playing around with natural dyes. And I started early so we could really get our technique down! I did a little googling on the matter and was not surprised that red cabbage is a wonderful dye. I was surprised however, to find that it dyes the eggs blue! And boring old brown onion skins, who knew they make a perfect orange dye!?
Well, let’s get started! Buy a handful of beets, a head of red cabbage and a brown onion…
Roughly chop your ingredients. I’m not sure that heat helps release the dye, but I tried it, just in case. The cabbage went over the stove top and the beets and onion were microwaved for a few minutes in separate bowls.
Leave the mixture to steep for at least 15 minutes and then strain it into a bowl or mason jar. Add your hard-boiled eggs and decide how long you want to wait. I left mine overnight in the fridge.
Here’s what I found out…the red cabbage and the onion skins were awesome! They had rich vibrant color. You could leave them in for an hour to have a pale color. The beets left overnight just turned brown. Boo! But, when I had checked them after about an hour, they were a pale pink. I predicted leaving them overnight would result in dark pink, alas brown was what we got.
These mimic robin’s eggs, in that they are slightly speckled and have varied color. I love how rustic they are. I think the possibilities are endless and I’m excited to try spinach and pomegranate seeds next!
//photographed at my home studio in Long Beach
LOOOOVE those blue ones !! Well done for thinking of natural dyes, some of those easter posts going around make me feel yucky just thikning about the ingredients used 😉 These, however, look tempting 😉
I think the brown is lovely! Not as lovely as the amazing blue of course but still beautiful.
The orange looks a lot like the colour of regular eggs here in the UK, white eggs are harder to find and a lot more expensive 🙁
I think all 3 colours look nice together!
From my Borsch making I know that beets turn brownish during cooking but if you cook them in slightly acid water they keep their vibrant red colour. I wonder what happens if you add a bit of lemon juice or vinegar to beet “water”. I have a couple of beets in the fridge and will try it out tomorrow!
If you boil the eggs wrapped in the dry onion peel and with a layer of tin foil you’ll get wonderful yelloe/orange/brown marbled eggs. You can also mix with peels from a red onion (grayish). Thanks for telling about the blue eggs!
Great tip…thanks!