After seeing the rash of egg-related articles in this last month's Bon Appetit and released throughout the month on their website, I was obsessed and could think of little else other than dyeing eggs. While Easter was a welcome excuse to dye some eggs, I really just wanted pretty coloured eggs for my regular ol' non-Easter life. Taking a hard boiled a egg for a snack (especially with my batch of flavoured salts) was infinitely more entertaining in it being a dark purple or vibrant yellow... rather than plain white.
Plus! It labelled my eggs in a sense. The hard boiled ones were coloured yellow and the raw ones were dark purple-blue. Now I could store them in the same container without mixing them up or having to spin-test them to figure out which were boiled (you know about the spin test, right??).
Ingredients:
Eggs... boiled or not
Natural food dyes... like saffron or hibiscus, as I used, or others
Vinegar
Hot water
Boil your water. Add your "dye" and a few tablespoons of vinegar to each bowl, then top with hot water. Steep as though you are making tea (about 5-10 minutes).
Add your eggs (already boiled, if cooking them) and let them sit in the steeped dye until they reach the desired colour.
I left the saffron yellow and hibiscus purple-blue eggs to steep for roughly 2 hours. I gently patted the eggs dry before returning them to my egg tray and the fridge.
Interestingly, the paper towel picked up some of the hibiscus dye from the eggs, leaving pale textured blotches in spots, which I actually quite liked. Almost like sponge painting in reverse...
Anyway, it's a little something extra that made me smile when I grabbed an egg from the fridge.
2 thought(s):
sorry my friend, but i think your saffron is fake,
it's safflower,
i've been fooled too actually and i found that mine it's fake too....
Wow, I never would have realized... well, that isn't entirely true. I never ever tried to use it in a paella or the like. I bet that would have showed me the light. I have a smaller (more expenisve) jar that I bought at a specialty spice market, which I know is saffron, but this was a gift from a friend who was travelling. It has worked great for dyeing Easter eggs though!
Thanks for the comment.
For anyone else, who cares to know... here is a wiki article on safflower or bastard saffron - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safflower
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