All Natural Homemade Food Coloring

Avoid the toxins of conventional food dyes by using natural homemade food coloring you can easily make at home! The U.S. Food and Drug Administration have acknowledged that artificial colors such as Red 40 and Yellow 5, trigger hyperactivity and behavioral problems with some children, yet they still allow it. It doesn’t stop there, each dye, through animal testing, can be linked to different diseases.
There are lot of things to appreciate from nature. Nature has given all colors that we need in our lives. With just few efforts, any color can be achieved with natural ingredients. Think about colorful vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices and more! Look at the gift of natural colors in various forms.

In this post, I will try to share all possible colors I have been using in my kitchen. It is actually lot of fun to prepare natural colors. In fact, I made a video on it.

and using these natural food colors, I make sweet, savory recipes easily. So we already discovered orange with carrot, yellow with turmeric (or Saffron can be used if you like the flavor in some recipes), spinach for green, beet for blood red color. Paprika(very mild chili) can be used for red color in savory recipes.
You can watch the recipe below of my rainbow steamed cake known as Dhokla

And when thinking of Red velvet cake, what could be better than nature’s gift Beet! I use concentrated beet puree to get the intense color. As you can see the color looks gorgeous, sexy!

Alright, so I am sure you already got some ideas on how to get the colors in their natural form from nature and now let’s go through more details. Let’s start with the colors that hard to achieve, for example, Royal Blue. Who doesn’t want to celebrate blue?
Natural Royal Blue Color:

To achieve blue color, I experimented with purple cabbage and blueberries. Both gives pretty color. To start with blueberry, all you have to do is puree the blueberries and pass through sieve for smooth texture. Then try adding little baking soda at a time to see it changing the color or if you have ascorbic acid, it will give different colors based on ph.
To start with cabbage, blench the purple cabbage and puree it. If the puree is not smooth, pass through the sieve. Add 1/2 tsp of baking soda at a time and see it changing the color. If you do this experiment with kids, you will have great time for sure.
Natural Black Color:

Black Beans, Blackberry Fruit and Black Raisins are perfect for achieving black color in recipes. I simply love to black raisin paste in desserts. Black beans itself or it’s remaining liquid after boiling can be used in recipes as well. Depending on your needs, you can always come up with the ideas on how these ingredients can be used.
Natural Pink Color:
Achieving pink is very easy from many fruits like raspberry, strawberries and if you use very small amount of beet, it will give nice pink color specially when blended with white icing or white ingredients. I use in hummus and rice as well. Berry pulp can be mixed with icing sugar and butter to prepare pink icing.