It’s a bit more involved than dropping a food coloring tablet into a cup of hot water, but making Easter egg dyes from fresh produce and spices could be a fun experiment to try with the kids.
Melissa Wright, a food safety extension specialist at Virginia Tech, suggests boiling beets or berries to create a pink dye, getting green dye from spinach, blue from purple cabbage and yellow from saffron or turmeric.
“They’re going to really impart a lot of color to that water,” Wright said of the seasonings.
The more water you use, the more diluted the color will be, so Wright suggests cooking it down after straining or filtering out the vegetable solids.
Adding a teaspoon of vinegar to the solution will help the dye stick to the eggs. But be prepared to see more muted colors.
“They’re going to be pretty with natural foods,” Wright said. “Are they going to be as vivid and bright as what I’m used to seeing? No.”
Wright said consumers are more interested these days in natural food dyes, but the dyes in store-bought kits are just as safe to use and consume.
“The shell is porous, but it’s very unlikely that you’re going to really get any dye through to the actual white of the egg. And even if you did, those food coloring items are food safe, so it’d be just like having food coloring in the food you already eat,” she said.
What is not safe to eat are eggs that are not properly cooked or stored.
To make the perfect hard-boiled eggs, Wright said:
- Place the eggs into a pot filled with cold water, and bring the water to a rolling boil.
- Remove the pot from heat and let the eggs sit in the hot water for about 15 minutes.
- Remove the eggs from the water and cool them quickly in an ice bath.
- Dry and refrigerate the eggs until you’re ready to decorate.
Hard-boiled eggs keep for a week in the fridge.
Wright doesn’t recommend eating any eggs used in an Easter egg hunt.
“It just depends on how long you think your egg hunt might take, how many little hands are going to be touching them,” she said. “If they’re outside of refrigeration for more than two hours, they’re going to need to be discarded.”
Plastic eggs are a good egg hunt alternative, but if you have your heart set on using dyed eggs, Wright suggested using dyeable craft eggs.
“They have ones that you can buy at the store that feel like eggshells, and you can color them and dye them, but they’re not actual eggs,” Wright said.
And they can become keepsakes or used again next year instead of winding up in the trash.
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