As a rule, visitors to restaurants and cafes pay attention not only to the taste of the served dishes, but also to how they are decorated. Therefore, chefs try to decorate this or that dish as best as possible. Most attention in this case is paid to sweets and desserts. At home, you can also create various patterns from cream and sprinkles.
It is best to learn how to make food coloring at home, rather than buying it in a store. The result will be no worse, in addition, it is not dangerous to health. Such a home-made dye is used to color sauces, jellies, mastics, creams and much more.
What are food colors?
Food colors are both synthetic and natural. In turn, synthetic are divided into liquid, dry and gel. Dry dyes are diluted in a small amount of liquid to give the dish the desired shade.
Powdered dyes are diluted with boiled water, alcohol or vodka, and also, if desired, are applied to baking in a dry form. Protein mass to create patterns and creams are usually stained with liquid dyes. They are often used in airbrushes or in sugar mastic as a substitute for water.
Liquid food coloring is very similar to gel, but the latter is more dense and concentrated. It is used in staining creams (not protein), glaze, mastic and dough. Using gel dyes, you can create both delicate shades and saturated and vibrant colors.
How to get a natural red dye
Such a dye can be obtained using the juice of berries, fruits and vegetables that contain red color, it can be:
- beet;
- Strawberry;
- currant;
- pomegranate and other food products.
But red food coloring can be obtained not only from fruits, try using dark red tomatoes, red pepper and paprika powder for this purpose. Nevertheless, the most beautiful color is obtained from beets.
Get the red dye from beets as follows:
- Wash the root crop thoroughly under running water, peel it, and then grate it. Pour the beets with water. A lot of liquid is not needed, it should only cover the grated vegetable. Put on a slow fire and cook for an hour.
- Please note that the pan should be covered with a lid. Add a little citric acid (1/2 teaspoon) to the broth, this will prevent it from discoloring. After cooling, the red food coloring should be filtered and then can be used.
How to make food coloring black
Black food coloring can be obtained in several ways:
- The first way. Mix five drops of purified glycerin with an activated carbon tablet.
- The second way, how to make food color in black at home. Black color can be obtained by mixing artificial colors of several colors. For example, take food colors of red, yellow and blue and mix thoroughly - in the end you get black.
- The third way, how to make food color in black at home. Take the cuttlefish ink. It’s quite easy to get them recently, they are sold in almost every large hypermarket. But despite the fact that the ink has almost no taste, still some specific flavor is present, and therefore it is not recommended to use such a black food coloring for mastic or other sweet dishes.
How to make dye for eggs
Yellow food coloring (recipe): Turmeric (3 tablespoons) should be added to a boiling vinegar solution. Remember that turmeric stains the skin quite strongly, so before you start working with this dye, be sure to wear rubber gloves to protect your hands from staining.
Pink color: chop 4 cups raw beets and add it to the egg bowl. If at first the eggs do not seem to you pink, but brown, do not be discouraged. After they dry, they will become a pleasant pastel shade.
Food coloring for blue eggs is done as follows: add 3 cups of chopped cabbage in purple or red to the solution. To get the eggs blue, they should be held in the solution for half an hour. If you want to achieve a blue color, then put the eggs in the refrigerator, and let them stand there in the solution all night.
Orange color: a beautiful orange tint to the eggs gives the onion husk (four glasses). To get a brighter color, then, as in the previous case, without removing the eggs from the dye, leave them all night in the refrigerator.
Do-it-yourself food coloring silver: put 2 cups of frozen blueberries in a container and add 2 cups of clean water to it. Wait until the mixture warms up to room temperature, and then crush the berries. Let stand a little longer, after which strain the solution. Put Easter eggs in the dye and refrigerate them - let them stay there until morning.
Beige dye
To make beige food coloring with your own hands, you should use tomato paste. The color saturation depends on the amount of this product, for example, if you add a lot of tomato to the cream, it will turn more orange than beige. Tomato paste does not change the taste of dessert.
If you have prepared several different natural dyes in advance, then you can create new colors from them if you wish. To do this, you only need to mix the existing ones. For example, to get the color of the sea wave, you should mix two dyes: green and blue, and for the blue tint you need to add green to red. Mixing red, blue and green produces black. A beautiful pistachio hue can be achieved by mixing blue and yellow dyes.
Yellow
To color the dish yellow, most often cooks use lemon. The lemon peel is rubbed on a fine grater, and then juice is squeezed out of it, which turns into a liquid food coloring. Turmeric dissolved in warm water also gives a beautiful yellow tint.
Green color
To get a rich green color, fresh spinach is most often used. It is chopped in a meat grinder or rubbed through a sieve. Then the mixture is boiled for 30 minutes, after which it is filtered.
Blue and purple colors.
Such colors can be obtained from blueberries, dark grapes or eggplant peels. You can also use purple cabbage for this purpose, which is pre-cut and boiled. Using sugar, you can get a brown color. To do this, sugar is mixed with water (5: 1) and placed in a skillet. Make a small fire and fry the sugar, remembering to stir it constantly. Gradually, the mixture begins to acquire a brown tint. Add a little more water to it and strain. In addition to sugar, brown can be obtained using cocoa, coffee or chocolate.
Why are artificial dyes harmful?
Today, a large number of artificial dyes are produced, which are used to give the dishes an attractive look. But it is not always known what exactly is part of these synthetic dyes. It often happens that their composition can be determined only through lengthy laboratory research.
Not in all cases, manufacturers are willing to comply with standards, and often the hazardous components in dyes exceed the acceptable content. They can not only cause allergies in people, but also negatively affect the nervous system, cause oxygen starvation and, worst of all, provoke the formation of tumors. Therefore, it is better not to use such products at all, but instead to learn how to make food coloring at home.
Conclusion
There are two types of food colors: synthetic and natural. The first of them are most often made from chemical ingredients, so it is wiser to give preference to natural ones. Natural food colors are made from herbal ingredients (usually vegetables and fruits).
Such dyes can be created independently at home and used to decorate all kinds of dishes.