We’ve Tested Pinterest’s Natural Easter Egg Dye Recipes
Can you make rainbow dyes from vegetable waste and other earthy organic matter? Tons of posts on Pinterest claim this is possible. We wanted to make sure. So we tested some recipes and found that some work great, while others just give you different shades of brown.
Eggs turn brown from onion skins
I had high hopes for this. In the past, I have successfully used onion skin to dye wool yarn. (They turned the white yarn into a beautiful golden yellow color.) However, my results here were disappointing.
To begin with, let’s clarify: we are really talking about the onion skin , and not about the onion itself. You can buy onion skins by walking over to the onion counter in the supermarket and simply digging through the bottom. Take a few onions and lay them down and the skin will slide into your hand. Stuff your bag: It feels like you’re stealing, but it’s literally trash from the grocery store. However, you can’t test this with a weightless bag of onion skins, so put a small onion in there.
To color the eggs, boil them in onion skins. Some recipes say that onion skins can be boiled and eggs can be soaked in liquid later. Some say you need vinegar. I tried all combinations of them and got the same result every time.
What you should get : Yellow onions should produce golden yellow eggs or blood red if soaked overnight. Red onions should give … pale green? HM.
What Really Happened : Brown. Lots of brown. Do you like brown eggs? Then you would probably buy brown eggs in the first place and don’t need this technique. I got neither yellow, nor red, nor pale green. I had different – frankly beautiful – shades of brown. The first egg that I boiled with red onion peels turned out to be wooden. He received an unwelcome compliment from my husband, who was walking in the kitchen at the time and whose hobby was woodworking.
I left one of the eggs in the red onion dye for about two days and it turned orange-brown like you can see above. It was the closest color to the promised colors to me, but it seems that whenever you leave eggs in the dye bath for a long time, you get weird patterns from sediment settling in the jar. I think go for it if you like it.
Your kitchen will smell like onions. Nice smell. Or onions and vinegar, which may be less enjoyable.
Practicality : Reasonable. You are just boiling onion skins and there is not much to peel – just rinse the pan.
Red cabbage somehow turns Robin’s eggs blue
Pinterest told me that red cabbage dyes eggs blue. I had my doubts: just because something is colorful doesn’t mean you can get that color to attach to something else. Also, red cabbage is purple, not blue.
Cabbage is easy to find at the grocery store, but I only had huge quantities of it. I had to buy a head of cabbage the same size as my real one. I chopped about a third and added to boiling water with an egg.
At first I was disappointed. I boiled an egg with kale for good and got lavender kale in lavender water while the egg was still protein. I added vinegar and boiled a little more, the water turned pink, but still no luck. This egg may have had a faint hue of lavender, that’s all. I put a fresh egg in a jar of kale, vinegar and water overnight as a last try so I can say I’ve tried everything.
What You Should Get : Blue Robin Egg
What Really Happened : I got a blue robin egg! Some magic must have happened in the refrigerator overnight. The egg I took out in the morning was very dark blue in color. Since then I have colored several eggs in the same water: when you take them out of the bath, they look purple, and as they dry, they turn blue-green.
Your kitchen will smell like cabbage and vinegar. I’m sure that I have ancestors who will reject my words, but cabbage smells terrible. The color is worth it anyway.
Practical : You have to plan ahead because the dye has to cool before it takes effect, and even then the egg takes several hours to take on color. Plus, you will have a lot of cabbage leftovers. Cook your best sauerkraut recipes!
Beets paint eggs pink, but use fresh rather than canned
In my store, beets are sold only with the tops of large wet tufts. I thought I could avoid repeating the giant cabbage smash by buying a can of canned beets – they’re pre-cooked after all, and the first step in dyeing the beets is to cook the beets – but that didn’t work. I boiled the beets with and without vinegar and eventually all the color was removed from the beets , Bunnicula style. The eggs did not turn red even after soaking overnight. Fail.
I went back and bought a giant bunch of fresh beets. I chopped the leaves and stems and cooked them with scrambled eggs and leftover sweet potato and they were delicious. Where have we been again? Oh yeah, egg dyeing. For this attempt, I chopped up fresh beets and added them to a pot of boiling water with eggs.
What you should get : pink.
What Really Happened: At first I thought I was going to get even more disappointed. I boiled an egg with beets and it came out pale canary yellow. But then I added vinegar to the beetroot water and it became the pink paint of my Pinterest dream. Twenty minutes of exposure in the paint gives the egg a pleasant shade of light hot pink. It gets deeper overnight.
Unfortunately, after a few weeks of storage in the refrigerator, the pink began to fade. Therefore, if you want your pink eggs to be as bright as possible, paint them no earlier than a day or two before displaying them.
Your kitchen will smell : beetroot (weak), then vinegar.
Practical : As long as you don’t mind slicing the beets (which might be attached to some monstrous greens), this isn’t too bad. And after you’ve boiled them, they’re perfectly cooked and ready to eat, so hello, free dinner.
Turmeric makes eggs yellow
Turmeric is the yellow spice we all know from Indian cuisine. This is what gives the commercial curry powder its yellow color. It sometimes even replaces the much more expensive saffron in rice dishes, as they both impart a golden glow.
I followed a recipe that required six tablespoons of ground turmeric, boiled in water, plus some vinegar. You can buy turmeric at the grocery store, but spend a fortune on two tiny bottles. Instead, go to an Indian grocery store and buy an almost priceless quart-sized bag.
What you should get : yellow.
What really happened : I turned yellow. I had the same color with or without vinegar, hot or cold, no matter how long I soaked it. Do you like yellow? This gives you yellow.
Your kitchen will smell like turmeric, which is difficult to describe: not quite spicy, rather slightly medicinal. It’s a mild smell, so don’t worry about it.
Practical : The only annoying thing is that the powdered turmeric is still in the dye liquid, making it messy. I didn’t try to strain it with a paper towel, but it might be possible.
Bottom line: forget the bow, but the other three work
Between turmeric, beets and cabbage, there are all three primary colors. Mix red and blue with magenta and so on – I have not tried these combinations, but I hope that with some faint memories of childhood drawing lessons, you can figure it out.
If you want yellow eggs , boil 6 tablespoons of turmeric in a glass or two of water. Dip eggs in the resulting soup for a few minutes.
If you want pink eggs , start with fresh beets. Chop and boil them, eat them for dinner, and mix the resulting beetroot liquid with vinegar to make a dye. The dyeing time ranges from a few minutes to hours, depending on how deep you want the pink to be.
If you want blue eggs , boil some kale and let the kale cool. The eggs take hours to absorb the cabbage coloring, so plan to color all the blue eggs at the same time in a large container.
Onions are fun to experiment with, but don’t expect them to turn blood red or pale green. You will see shades ranging from orange brown to brownish brown. If that’s your thing, enjoy!