Vegan Food Colourings

Find out how to make all-natural home made food colourings

For thousands of years, vegetables, fruits, and other plants have been used to make homemade dyes. Learning how to make natural dyes yourself is easy, eco-friendly, and fun. While artificial colorings are not really healthy you can just replace any of your  favourites just by using fruit juice or powder! Plus, what you get is an endless amount of vitamins and minerals added to the food you’re gonna have! As you have may noticed I love to turn food into something really eye-catching, and while I mostly focus on desserts where you can make any frosting or topping 

the colour you want, yesterday I decided to make something usual. Since it’s been for ages that I’m craving sushi but never had the chance to go and get some, yesterday I decided to make it for lunch. It’s actually pretty easy, just need to cook rice sushi following the method in the box and then once ready spread it on the nori sheet together with any veggie you like and then roll it up. I also put some beetroot juice to turn it pink and the result was really vibrant and joyful! Try to think about a party where you make lots of colorful sushi and everyone gets a bite of a different colour. Wouldn’t it be fun? The key to get a vibrant colour starting from the produce is to get a concentrated solution. Using a juicer is the best option to start with, then you need to slowly boil the juice until you reduced it for about the 1/2 of the initial amount. Remember, before to use it, you always have to add it cold, so once ready leave it to cool down at room temperature then in the fridge. Natural colouring can be also kept in the freezer for any time you want, while if not frozen they only last (properly stored in the fridge) for about 3-4 days. One thing that 

natural food colors have that commercial colors don’t is taste. The more color you add to the frosting, the more it’s going to taste like that ingredient. This may not matter much for ingredients like fruit, matcha, coffee, or cocoa, which have flavors commonly used in baking, but it makes things tricky for ingredients like turmeric or spinach. Said that let’s see where you can get your colours from:

Pink: strawberries, raspberries, pink pitaya (dragon fruit)

Red: beets

Orange: carrots

Yellow: saffron, turmeric

Green: matcha, spinach, spirulina

Blue: red cabbage + baking soda or blue spirulina

Purple: blueberries, purple sweet potato, red cabbage

Brown: coffee, cacao powder

Black: activated charcoal

There are two ways to make food colorings: powders and concentrated liquids. Powders are the easiest way to make colorings because they dissolve easily and are already somewhat concentrated, meaning they can lead to more intense color. What you can do is to get freeze-dried fruits and grind them down to a powder using a coffee-grinder or a blender or eventually using a dehydrator you can dehydrate produce thin slices and once completely dried blend to a powder. You can store colouring powders in a dried place inside of an air-tight container. 

Once you’ve made your food colorings, all you have to do is add them to frosting or any ingredient to turn your favourite recipe in to a beautiful masterpiece! Just like with traditional food colorings, it’s best to add the color in small amounts gradually until you achieve the color you want. Keep in mind that you can add more powdered coloring than liquid coloring without affecting the recipe before to get into that! Now it’s your turn, let’s create and share on social media tagging us in your photos!