18 Plants To Use For Natural Dye

If you ever want to add vibrant green color to your pasta, smoothies, sauces, or dips, spinach is your one-stop shop. This superfood veggie is delicious, nutritious, and so very useful. Wonderful frozen, canned, and fresh, spinach will bring a much-loved green pizazz or color and flavor to any meal.

Suppose you want to truly utilize spinach to its best potential, blanch and blend it into a pulp. Then strain this pulp through a fine sieve or cheese close to get a dark green liquid. This emerald liquid is your dye, and my goodness, is it flavorful and beautiful. This dye is the perfect way to bring an artistic flair to your dishes and step up your presentation game. By using this liquid in place of broth or water, you will see stunning results when you use it to make doughs and batters.

Another delightfully green herb that somewhat resembles cilantro in looks but definitely not in taste is parsley. Parsley, commonly available with either curly leaves or flat leaves, is a wonderful addition to salads, sauces, and stocks and is also a hearty winter herb that dries well. Parsley, like spinach and cilantro, can bring a fantastic green shade to your food.

However, unlike spinach and cilantro, parsley makes a slightly darker dye thanks to its naturally darker shade of green, meaning that it can make your doughs and batters a deep, alluring green. If you do not have the time or energy to go through the whole blanching, blending, and straining process, then just mince your parsley very finely. Adding tiny flecks of parsley will create a lovely green-speckled pattern on your final masterpiece; the green spots will be fantastic, whether they are lasagna sheets or savory crepes.

Have you ever stained your hands when cutting beats? What about your cutting board? Well, it should be no surprise that if beets can stain our skin and kitchens, they can also color our foods. The process of making beet dye can be lengthy but wholly worth it. In short, you have to boil red beets, let them sit for about a day, and then boil them again, making it a drawn-out endeavor but one that will result in an entirely natural and very potent red dye.

There are many red food coloring substitutes, and beet dye is one of the best. Not only for food, beet dye is also great for cloth and egg dying, and with the right ratios can result in a rich red or light pink. If you doubt the power of a nice beet dye, try making beet red velvet cake and marvel at the intensity of the beet's natural color.

Another red berry option that will bring a welcome brightness to your dishes is raspberries. With their zesty and floral flavor, raspberries make the perfect dye for desserts, dishes, and drinks. The best part is that instead of going through the mashing, straining, and separating process, you can simply buy freeze-dried raspberries, and they will dye your food instantly.

Freeze-dried raspberries can naturally transform your batters and frostings into shades of pink in seconds, entirely without artificial food coloring. Simply add powdered freeze-dried raspberries, mix them thoroughly into whatever you are making, and let the color take shape. You can swirl the raspberries to create a twisting pattern or ensure the color is uniform and evenly distributed — whatever you fancy.

Another kitchen staple that often stains our counters, hands, and bowls, turmeric is a famous superfood that brings flavor and color to many of our favorite foods. In addition to transforming meats, stews, rice dishes, and desserts a lovely golden color, turmeric also boasts a handful of health benefits. According to Hopkins Medicine, turmeric can help with digestion, muscle aches, inflammation, and even anxiety.

Therefore, next time you are looking for a way to make your foods an alluring golden yellow, opt for turmeric and you will be pleasantly surprised. In fact, using turmeric as food coloring is so easy you have no excuse. Simply put some dry, powdered turmeric into your dishes, both savory and sweet, and you will be left with stunning, sunny results.

Another fantastic cloth dye option, onions, more specifically onion skins, can dye your cloth, eggs, and yarn, lovely earth shades. Depending on the onions you use, the dye can range from brown to golden. The best part is that using onion skins to make dye is incredibly simple and only requires you to simmer the skins in water until the liquid turns dark.

Since onion skins are edible, it is possible to dye food with them, but on the other hand, it is difficult to get a substantial color since the dye liquid is often very diluted. Therefore, the most successful food item you can most likely dye with onion skin dye is once again easter eggs. This easter you should be sure to take on the challenge of dying all of your eggs with naturally beautiful dyes.

These pesky weeds have impossible taproots and bloom into whimsical puff balls. Dandelions, if you do not know how to consume them, can be very frustrating to deal with. But the good news is that you can eat them, both the leaves and yellow fluffy flowers. Cooking dandelion leaves can be done in a similar fashion to how you would cook other braising greens. They are nicely bitter and can be used for a braise, or blended and strained to make a green dye like you would for spinach or cilantro.

The yellow flowers will give you yellow dye, what a surprise. The fluffy flowers are great deep-fried, or if you want just the springtime yellow color, you can tear off the petals and add them to your concoctions. Dandelion petals are delicious and beautiful in shortbread cookies or pancakes and there is that added level of satisfaction knowing that you harvested them yourself.

These stunning flowers that are so commonly bought and discarded actually have great potential when it comes to dying your food and fabrics. When dying cloth, you can use almost any rose and simmer it to extract the color. You can then let your fabric soak in this liquid until it has absorbed as much color as possible. You can also place the petals directly onto your fabric and then steep the fabric bundled around the petals so that they directly infuse into the cloth.

To use rose petals in your food, it is recommended that you use a type that has been specifically bred for eating. While all roses are edible, some taste better than others, so when using them to flavor and color your foods, it is important to use the best ones. If you do want to add some sprinkles of pink or red to your dishes, not to mention white, yellow, purple, and orange, then try mixing some rose petals into your foods and appreciate their delicate beauty.

Red cabbage does not, in fact, dye things red; it actually, when mixed with baking powder, turns a bright blue. Cyan, to be more exact, is one of the base colors that is needed to create other pigments, such as green. Mixing red cabbage with baking powder has been a well-known home-dying hack for a long time, but it was not until recently that scientists began trying to duplicate the color for food (via ScienceAdvances).

Recreating the cabbage's signature blue proved to be difficult and time-consuming. The best candidate is still very labor-intensive to produce but is a promising option when looking for a natural blue food dye. Therefore, while you cannot likely use cabbage to dye anything other than eggs or cloth at home, keep your eye on the natural food dye market for when cabbage-based food coloring makes it big.

These adorable berries are delicious and can bring a very vibrant blue color to your desserts. They are named blueberries for a reason, and if you have ever had a handful of frozen blueberries, you will know that they have a strong color that can stain your skin. Like raspberries, when blueberries are freeze-dried and blended into a powder, the resulting blue dust is the perfect way to turn your desserts into a fantastic blue.

Adding blueberry powder to frostings, cookies, and drinks will also give them a subtle blueberry flavor. Who would be mad about that? With their scrumptious flavor and naturally bright blue color, blueberries are the best way for you to start dying everything blue.