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Did you know that you can only colour your Easter eggs using natural products?
We've put together a short list of natural colourings that you can use to dye your Easter eggs this year.
Ingredient: Aronia juice.
Technique: Simply boil the eggs in aronia juice instead of water. The eggs take on a light sheen all by themselves. By adding a little vinegar to the juice, the colour becomes a little redder.
Ingredient: Madder root
Technique: Sprinkle approx. 50 g of chopped madder root with approx. 2 litres of water, leave to soak overnight and filter. Cook the boiled eggs without adding vinegar. Place them in the madder decoction and top up with the very hot cooking water. Leave the eggs to cool in the dye bath. At first, they turn pink, but after they have been in the bath longer, their rusty colour becomes more intense. As they dry, they darken further. The colour is matt, but you can make the eggs shine with a little oil.
Ingredient: Red cabbage and white wine vinegar
Technique: Finely chop 1½ kg red cabbage, boil it in a large saucepan with 1½ l water, simmer for approx. 25 minutes. Strain the cooking juices into a container, add 1 tbsp white wine vinegar. Cook the hard-boiled eggs, dipping them while still very hot into the hot red cabbage juice. The eggs will start to colour after about an hour. They will be darker if left overnight in the bath (in the fridge).
Suggestion: serve the red cabbage as a vegetable or in a salad.
Ingredient: Red cabbage and blueberry juice
Technique: Adding about 1 dl of blueberry juice to the red cabbage decoction produces indigo blue to grey hues.
Ingredient: Blueberry juice
Technique: Boil hard-boiled eggs and place in blueberry juice. Unlike red cabbage decoction, blueberry juice colours very quickly. Lighter tones appear after a few minutes and darker tones after 30 minutes.
Remove the eggs from the juice and blot gently with kitchen paper. The moist purple colour is very sensitive to abrasion.
Ingredient: Turmeric
Technique: Boil ½ l water with 1 tsp turmeric. Cooking the eggs directly in the decoction will produce dark yellow tones. If the eggs are immersed in the decoction after cooking, the tones obtained will be lighter.
Ingredient: Turmeric and red cabbage
Technique: Eggs that were previously dyed with red cabbage can be coloured green by being plunged in a decoction of turmeric afterwards. Boil ½ l water with 1 tsp turmeric and fill a large container. Briefly immerse the blue eggs in the water.
Caution: turmeric colours very quickly. So only immerse the light blue eggs for a very short time.
Ingredient: Beetroot juice
Technique: Leave the hard-boiled eggs in unpasteurised beetroot juice for approx. 1 hour or squeeze your own raw beetroot juice. Remove the eggs from the juice and blot gently with kitchen paper. The moist pink colour is very sensitive to abrasion. There's no point in leaving the eggs in the juice any longer, as the pink colour won't improve after several hours.
As you can see, the ingredients that we can easily find in our kitchen can also be used to create beautiful colours to dye Easter eggs!
