How to make food coloring: recipes. What and how do you make natural food colors of red, yellow, orange, blue, purple, black, beige, white, green with your own hands? Mixing Natural Food Colors: The Rules

Everyone knows that artificial colors used in cooking are very dangerous to health. Therefore, many try to use natural products to obtain color. It is not difficult to do this, and the naturalness and safety of the dishes will be guaranteed.

Why dyes are needed

Dyes are divided into natural and synthetic. Natural dyes are plant products and do not contain chemicals. Synthetic dyes can be gel, liquid and dry. Food coloring is used in the food industry to turn ordinary foods into works of art and boost sales. They do not have any taste properties, so they do not affect the taste of the products.

Substances obtained through a chemical process are harmful to the body. Therefore, many people prefer to prepare dyes on their own from more natural products. Thus, you can not only make the dish colorful, but absolutely safe. And for this you don’t need to buy expensive components at all, since ordinary products will do.

Harm of artificial dyes

The chemical industry produces a huge amount of substances, which are then used to make products more attractive. But not everyone knows what exactly is hidden behind synthetic dyes. For example, even the composition of most of these mixtures cannot be determined without lengthy laboratory studies.

And manufacturers do not always adhere to standards and easily violate the amount of dangerous components contained in dyes. At the same time, the harm of such substances is not only in possible allergies. Some preservatives can cause oxygen starvation, adversely affect the nervous system and provoke the development of tumors. Therefore, it is important to limit the use of such products, and use only natural dyes for homemade dishes.

How to make dye at home

To do this, just open the refrigerator and choose any vegetable or fruit that matches the color. You can take juices, jams, herbs and even seasonings for this purpose. As for the storage of natural dye, without sugar it will only be good for a few days. But with the addition of sugar, the dye will quietly stand for 10-14 days. The main thing is to place it in a glass container with a tight lid and do not leave it warm.

Red color
In order to give the dish such a shade, you can use the juices of raspberries, strawberries, cherries or cranberries. Ordinary red wine and various jams are also suitable. It is advisable to add several components, then the red color will be more saturated. Often, housewives use ordinary beets to prepare dishes with a red tint. And for good reason, because this vegetable is considered the strongest natural dye.

It is not difficult to get a coloring pigment from beets. To do this, 1-2 fruits must be washed, peeled and grated. Then the beets are poured with water and boiled for about an hour over low heat. Also, 0.5 tsp must be added to the broth. citric acid, otherwise the dye will discolor from air oxidation. Once the beetroot has cooled, it must be strained and used to color the dish.

Orange color
The easiest way to get orange natural dye is to use carrots. It also needs to be cleaned and grated. Then the vegetable is laid out in a pan and poured with butter, previously melted in a water bath. The ratio of carrots and butter should be 1:1. Next, the mixture should be darkened on the stove for about 5 minutes. The oil should acquire the desired shade, after which the cooled carrots should be squeezed through cheesecloth.

Yellow
To give the dish a yellow color, lemon is most often used. Its zest is rubbed on a very fine grater, and then squeezed and filtered juice. You can also get a great yellow tint by mixing a little turmeric in warm water.

Green color
For a rich green color, you can use fresh spinach. It must be rubbed through a sieve or crushed with a meat grinder. The resulting mixture must be boiled for half an hour, and then filtered through cheesecloth.

Purple and blue colors
They can be obtained by using eggplant skins, dark grapes or blueberries. Purple cabbage is also perfect, which you just need to cut and boil. If you need to get a brown color, then the easiest way to achieve this shade is with sugar. It must be mixed with water in a ratio of 5: 1 and placed in a pan.

It is necessary to fry sugar on a small fire and at the same time stir it constantly. After the mixture has acquired the desired shade, water is added to it and filtered. In addition to burnt sugar, chocolate, coffee or cocoa can be used to obtain brown color.

Black color
Often black is used to decorate dishes. Achieving such a shade is not as difficult as it seems at first glance. For sweet dishes, for example, for a cake, you need to use cocoa powder. But not ordinary, but a special grade powder called "Dutch Ultra". It contains more chocolate and is itself much darker than traditional cocoa. And for salty dishes, squid ink is ideal.

Beige color
In order to get a beige color, many chefs recommend adding, for example, a little tomato paste to the cream. The color depends on the amount of paste, so when you add a large amount of tomato, the cream will turn out not beige, but closer to orange. Tomato paste does not affect the taste of dessert.

If several natural dyes prepared earlier are stored in the refrigerator, then you do not need to look for ingredients to get a new color. You can mix existing colors and get the one you need. For example, for the color of the sea wave, you can mix blue and green, and to get a blue dye, just mix green with red. In order to get a black tint, you need green, blue and red dyes. And a beautiful pistachio color will turn out if you mix yellow and blue.

A lot depends on when exactly the coloring matter is added to the dish. Therefore, it is important to know:

1. Dyes should not be added to fresh dough. It is better to saturate pastries with dye. But this rule does not apply to meringues.
2. If the dough is needed not for baking, but for noodles or dumplings, then dyes, on the contrary, are recommended to be added immediately during kneading. After all, then it will not work to paint the finished product.
3. In the cream that is used for decoration, the dye also needs to be added at the last moment. Otherwise, excess components may adversely affect the stability of the cream during whipping.
4. Do not rush and add as much dye as possible. 1-2 drops are enough to see what color will turn out. Yes, and make it richer then much easier.

These are just the basic ways to get different colors. If you approach the matter with imagination, you can get unusual shades. They will decorate any dish and surprise guests very much. And safe components will not harm health, so all the goodies can be eaten by children.

Video: do-it-yourself natural food coloring

Dear BBs! Very often there are questions about how to make a dye for a cake, cream and mastic at home, if they are not in stores.

Yes, to be honest, I myself faced this issue. In stores, they make big eyes at the question of food dyes, but I really want a cake with a beautiful design. So, in the vastness of our beloved and ubiquitous Internet, I still found a few words about how to make color.

The color of the cream can be given:
Chocolate - cocoa powder;
Yellow - egg yolks or carrot juice;
Pink - beetroot juice or jam;
Green - spinach juice or a few drops of greenery;
Orange - burnt sugar diluted with water;

And it’s already according to the right cookbooks)

Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant is sitting. A familiar phrase from childhood, which always helps out if you forgot the sequence of the color spectrum. And if this issue can be dealt with only with the help of a playful statement, then the issue of food coloring cannot be easily solved either. What is the difference between dry and liquid dyes? Why does chocolate curl up when dyed? What is the best color for mastic or cream for a cake? And this is only a small part of the main questions about food coloring. But it is with this ingredient that every confectioner encounters most often! Let's look into the details.

Let's start with the classification. All food colors can be divided into several groups: dry, liquid, gel, kandurins, sprays, food markers. In addition to the variety of forms of release, dyes are divided into two large (and very important!) Categories according to their chemical basis: water-soluble and fat-soluble. About which of the two categories this or that dye belongs to can be read on the packaging. If the dye is fat-soluble, there are usually markings: choco color (FoodColours manufacturer), oil candy color (AmeriColor), the word “Lak” (Russian manufacturers) and others like that. Water-soluble ones are often not labeled, so if you don’t see a special sign or inscription on the package, then this dye is definitely water-based.

From the school course, we all know that the different density of water and oil (and products containing it) does not allow them to mix with each other. One of the most common confectionery mistakes is to add the first dye that comes to hand to chocolate. Of course, it may magically happen that exactly the right dye comes into your hand, but most likely not. The chocolate will curl up, turn into a plasticine mass and go to the trash. We decided to ease your painful thoughts a little when choosing one or another dye when coloring different products and made a visual diagram.

Dry dyes.

Powdered dyes. Most often, before use, they are diluted in water or vodka. Used to color biscuits, creams and chocolate. In the latter case, the dye is not diluted with water, and do not forget about the marking (oil) on the package. In addition, all dry dyes can be used in dry form as a pigment. They are used to color mastic or wafer paper, for example, when creating sugar or wafer flowers. With the help of dry dyes applied with a brush or sponge, smooth and natural transitions can be achieved. Among other things, dry dyes are an important assistant in the preparation of French macarons. No excess moisture, uniform coloring and economical consumption.

Gel dyes.

Universal water-soluble dyes that are suitable for coloring biscuits, fondant, icing, creams, meringues and more. They have a thick texture, rich color, good hiding power. Gel colors are the most necessary tool for creating unique cakes. After all, it is among them that you can find the necessary shade for cream or mastic. The palette of gel dyes is very diverse, especially AmeriColor. In it you can find not only several shades of pink or green, but also unusual “dusty” colors with the mysterious names “moss”, “pumpkin”, “cypress” (we will talk about them in more detail next week!).

liquid dyes.

Less dense, flowable water-based dyes. To a lesser extent, they are suitable for coloring creams and mastics, but they can still be used to color almost any mixture. You should be a little more careful with them, as excess moisture can destroy the texture of the product being dyed. Overdoing liquid coloring when making cupcakes can result in an unstable cream, and the mastic can become overly soft and sticky. But liquid dyes are ideal for direct dyeing. With their help, you can draw on the surface of the cake, gingerbread and mastic. Also, the use of liquid dyes when dyeing biscuits (for example, for red velvet) is a more rational and economical solution.

Kandurins.

A special type of dry food coloring with characteristic shiny particles. These particles come in different fractions, that is, grinding, which makes some kandurins look like solid shiny dust, while others consist of a powder with sparkles inside. They can be used both dry and diluted with water or vodka. With their help, any product can be given a brilliant shade. Kandurins are usually applied to the surface of cream, mastic, icing, chocolate. The most popular shades of kandurins: gold, silver, copper. It is these shades that are indispensable when creating metalized cakes. And if in the case of chocolate, it is recommended to apply Kandurin in a dry form, then on a cream or mastic in a reconnoitered one. In these cases, the gloss will be maximum, and the coverage is uniform. Also, kandurins are indispensable for the finishing decor of cakes and cupcakes - a few strokes of a dry brush are appropriate for almost any design.

Sprays.

In addition to traditional types of dyes, dyes in the form of sprays are becoming especially relevant. The most commonly used are gold, silver and mother-of-pearl options. With a spray, you can achieve a uniform metallic color. You can spray on any, absolutely any surface: chocolate, mastic, pasta and, most importantly, cream. After all, there is no other option to cover the cap of a cupcake with glitter, for example.

Now elastic mastic is extremely indispensable in creating true confectionery masterpieces. With its help decorate cakes, make figurines for decorating all kinds of cakes. But the mastic itself looks very boring and uninteresting. It resembles white plasticine in appearance, only sweet and edible. Products from such a product will come out monotonous and faded. Dyes for sweet mastic, which can be both natural and synthetic, will add the missing beauty and brightness to the cake.

What are the dyes?

Dyes can be liquid, gel and dry:

• . Liquid dyes. With their help, creams for confectionery and drawing protein mass are colored. These tools can be used anywhere.
• . Dry dyes for mastic. Produced in powder form. With their help, you can give the desired shade to any confectionery product. Diluted in boiled water or alcohol.
• . Gel dyes. In some ways, they are similar to liquid dyes. They are concentrated, which allows them to be used extremely economically and dosed. Various creams and glazes are painted with such means. Often paint is added directly to the dough to make it unusual.

Some are afraid to use synthetic paint, fearing to harm their health. These fears and doubts are unfounded. If doubts do not leave, you can also prepare food colors for mastic at home from affordable and inexpensive products. Preparing natural dyes for elastic mastic is not difficult at all.

Making our own food coloring

A yellow or brown hue will come out of the roast, which is extremely easy to prepare.

1. To do this, five parts of granulated sugar are poured into a deep bowl and one part of water is poured, the container is put on a small fire and boiled until a thick mass of beautiful dark brown color is formed.
2. Next, the pan must be removed from the stove and add water in small portions, stirring constantly.
3. The resulting solution must be filtered.
4. To get a yellow tint, you can take chopped saffron. It is poured with warm water for a day, after which it is filtered.

The source of the brown color can be chocolate or strong coffee. Depending on how the required dye is added to the mastic, the result will be obtained.

From beets you can get a delicate pink and rich red color. Depending on the concentration of juice, one or another tone will turn out. The beets are rubbed on the largest grater, transferred to a container and poured with water, covered with a lid and boiled for at least an hour. After that, the liquid must be drained, and the beet pulp must be squeezed out.

A pinch of citric acid is added to this solution, so the solution will remain bright and saturated. No less beautiful shades of red can be obtained by boiling the juices of any red berries. Making dyes to give different shades of mastic at home is not difficult at all.

Orange color will give juicy carrots, grated on a coarse grater and fried in butter. The oil will not burn at all if you first grease the pan with vegetable oil. After about five minutes, the carrots will become soft and can be removed from the heat. The slightly cooled mass is squeezed through double gauze or a dense cloth.

Spinach will serve as a source of green hues. It is passed through a press or crushed with a blender, then wrapped in cloth and squeezed. A more saturated tone will turn out if you boil the spinach juice over low heat for about forty minutes.

Violet and lilac dyes will give blueberries and grapes.

color mix

But what if you want to create something special, but there are too few shades available? What can replace the dyes for mastic to get a new color? You can get the desired color by combining certain means:

• . yellow + blue = green
• . green + black = dark green
• . yellow + lilac = light green
• . yellow + green + white = light green
• . red + green = swamp green
• . lilac + pink = lavender
• . green + yellow + orange = blue
• . red + purple = plum
• . red + yellow + blue = burgundy
• . white + red = pink
• . yellow + orange = peach
• . yellow + red = orange
• . white + green + yellow = lemon
• . yellow + red + white = beige
• . brown + orange = terracotta

Secrets of making paints

For many home cooks, it remains a mystery how to paint the mastic with dry dyes so as not to spoil the elastic mass. Even an inexperienced confectioner can cope with such a task, if you use food dyes for elastic mastic in your work.

Gel dye will need just a drop. The paint is added directly to the material and vigorously kneaded until a homogeneous plastic mass is obtained. It is necessary to mix very intensively and quickly, otherwise the mass will harden and the color will be distributed quite unevenly.

When using dry products, you can paint the mass in two ways. In the first case, an ordinary toothpick is taken and immersed in a dry dye, and then in the mass itself. This is done several times, and then the mastic is mixed. Knead until the color is evenly distributed.

In the second case, quite a bit of dry paint is placed in some container. Just a teaspoon of paint is enough. Drop 3 drops of water or lemon juice into the container, then mix well. Place this mixture directly into the mastic dough and knead vigorously. Now you know how to make a dye for elastic mastic quickly and easily.

Of course, this is a personal matter for everyone, which dyes for mastic are better to use: homemade or synthetic. It is important to remember only one thing, that you cannot save on your own health, so you need to choose the best. If you choose a synthetic mastic dye for the cake, read the composition on the package carefully. And if you prefer to make homemade dyes for plastic mastic with your own hands, use the most ripe and fresh products for this purpose.

If you look closely at the composition of many products, you can often find artificial ingredients there. Fortunately, many of them can be replaced with natural ones when cooking. The quality of the food will not change, but rather get better. Thus, at home, you can prepare a safe natural dye.

In cooked dishes, not only taste is important, but also appearance. That is why professional chefs pay special attention to their decoration. Of course, most of all culinary specialists try on desserts and sweets. Beautiful curls of cream, patterns of sprinkles are easy enough to reproduce at home, as well as color cakes and cream.

As dyes, it is better to use not purchased, but prepared with your own hands. The result is also colorful, but safer for health. Food coloring at home can be used to color creams, mastic, jellies, cakes, sauces.

Food coloring at home: cooking methods

Food coloring at home can be obtained from various vegetables and berries. For this, juice is squeezed out of them.

Pink and red shades are obtained from fresh or boiled beets. A small root crop is rubbed on a coarse grater and transferred to a saucepan. Grated beets are poured with water so that it barely covers the vegetable. Boil over low heat for 50-60 minutes. The beets are thrown through a sieve, draining the juice into a separate container. Add citric acid to the resulting liquid at the tip of the knife - so the color will be more resistant.

Pink shades can also be obtained from berries. Suitable for this: strawberries, raspberries, currants, cranberries. Usually they are kneaded, after which the juice is filtered through cheesecloth.

For coloring second courses, chopped tomatoes or tomato paste are usually used. You can adjust the color saturation with sour cream or cream.

How to make green dye? To do this, stock up on spinach. It is usually sold fresh in bunches or frozen in small bags. Fresh spinach is more suitable for dyeing. It must be washed, cut and put in a blender. Chop the spinach, put on cheesecloth and squeeze the juice out of it.

In a similar way, green dye at home is prepared from watercress. By the way, it can be used not only for desserts, but also for savory dishes. So spinach juice is used in the preparation of the traditional Chinese dish Bao Tzu. Spinach is added to the yeast dough, in which the salty filling is then wrapped. The result is green round pies.

A delicate lilac color can be obtained from red cabbage. It is finely chopped, stewed with a little water. After that, they are crushed with a blender and the juice is passed through gauze.

The added cocoa will help color the cakes brown. It is also added to creams. Dr. a way to get a sweet brown filling - chocolate ganache. It is prepared very simply and, in fact, is a cream that can be used to layer cakes and stuff cakes.

For ganache, 200 ml of cream (preferably fat, from 33 percent) is heated to a boil and poured over 200 g of broken dark chocolate. The mixture is stirred until the chocolate is completely melted. Chocolate ganache is left at room temperature for 40-60 minutes and then used for its intended purpose.

In another way, a brownish tint can be obtained using roasted sugar. To do this, sugar is mixed with water in a ratio of 5 to 1. The resulting mixture is heated in a small saucepan until the sugar dissolves. The mixture should turn brownish (while making sure that the solution does not burn, otherwise it will acquire an unpleasant aftertaste). The resulting solution is used for coloring desserts and sweet dishes.

Orange color is obtained with the help of carrots. To do this, it is rubbed on a grater and fried in a small amount of butter until it reaches full readiness. Then the carrots are filtered through cheesecloth. The resulting liquid will be the dye.

Also, the saffron spice will help to give a yellowish tint to the dough.

Sweet creams for cakes and pastries can be colored in pastel colors with jam. For this, currants, raspberries, strawberries are suitable.

Dyes for mastic: options

Dyes are almost always used to create jewelry from mastic. They can give color to individual pieces of fondant, from which flower meadows, decorative patterns, stripes, and various figures are then molded. Basically, purchased concentrated food coloring is used for these purposes. Just a few drops are enough to give the mastic a rich color.

Home dyes are used a little differently. The fact is that for saturation of coloring, you need to use a very large amount of juice of beets, carrots and other vegetables and berries. In this case, the mastic becomes liquid and for density you need to constantly stir in powdered sugar.

Of course, you can get a bright mastic by staining with juice, but then there is another minus - the finished figures will taste like vegetables or berries. It turns out that homemade dyes are not quite suitable for a rich color. On the other hand, they are indispensable if you want to give pastel shades to the pastel. All you need is some juice.

Making mastic: a simple recipe

In order for the mastic to be painted more evenly, it is better to make it yourself.

Compound:

• American marshmallow marshmallow - 200 g
• Powdered sugar -250 g
• Lemon juice -2 cl. l.
• Butter -2 tbsp. l.

Cooking:

1. Put all the ingredients in one container and put in the microwave. Heat until everything is melted.
2. From the resulting soft mass, reminiscent of plasticine, you can immediately sculpt or pre-paint it.
3. For coloring, it is better to divide the mastic into small portions. On small pieces, you can choose the right shade by mixing the juices of beets, carrots, spinach. Having picked up the desired color, the juice is dripped onto the mastic and they begin to carefully mix and change the piece.

Dyes for mastic can be used not only for uniform coloring, but also for creating beautiful effects.

With a few drops of juice, you can give the mastic marble shades. To do this, apply a few drops of dye to the mastic in different places. Then pull it into a sausage and connect the edges. Next, you should continue to add the dye and then stretch and connect the mastic. Remember that the amount of dye to create marble patterns should be small. Also, do not knead the fondant for a long time - you may end up with a monochromatic color.