Natural Easter Egg Dyes

Many people want to dye eggs for Easter but they don’t want to use artificial coloring.  Are there options for natural Easter egg dyes? Fortunately, you can use foods and flowers to make your own natural Easter egg dyes; you probably have natural foods that can be used to dye eggs in your home.

First, determine what coloring you want for your eggs.  From your spice rack to your fridge crisper drawer, there are a variety of ways to get naturally occurring dyes.

For yellows, cooked carrots, ground cumin and boiled yellow gold apple peels would work great.

For pinks consider items like frozen raspberries, cranberry juice or boiled red onion peels.

For blue, canned blueberries or boiled red cabbage leaves work well.

Once you’ve decided which colors you want, you need to decide how strong you want the colors to be.

Determine the best way to achieve that color:

While you can get naturally occurring dye out of foods, it is best to try both fresh and frozen produce. Skip canned produce with the exceptions being canned cherries and blueberries. Because canned produce will result in much paler colors in general, use fresh or frozen produce as you’ll get far more good color for your eggs.

Sometimes you’ll have to boil the food to extract the dye. Boiling tends to be a good way to utilize these natural Easter egg dyes, even for the ones that work without boiling. In addition, boiling the colors with vinegar will result in deeper colors, which is great.

The best process for utilizing the colors found in plants, such as lavender blossoms, and foods, such as beets or pomegranates, is to dye them as you hard boil them. To do this, layer your eggs in the bottom of a pan, cover them with water, insert the item that is adding the natural dye, even if it is a tea bag, and add a teaspoon or so of vinegar. Then, bring the water to a boil before you turn it down. A hard boil will hard boil the eggs, but may also crack them. So, let the eggs simmer in the color for about 15 minutes, or until you get your desired color and doneness. It can simmer for longer if necessary to produce the desired color results.

Instead of buying a kit to dye your Easter eggs, take advantage of what you already have at home.