I’ve always wanted to dye eggs using natural foods instead of the little colored pellets from the drugstore that produce bright, BRIGHT Easter eggs. After consulting several websites and books about the best foods to use and how exactly to dye eggs using beets or kale or onion skins (the online instructions for this are pretty vague), I found that a lot of what was suggested didn’t work at all, or it took so long that I would never do it with kids. My girls’ little heads would have exploded with anticipation waiting for grape juice to turn an egg to a nice shade of lavender – which is funny, considering how grape juice is such an instant-and-forever kind of stain on anything else it touches.
The colors that did work are amazing – soft and rich and glowing so beautifully that I went a little crazy and took too many photos. I had the best results with onion skins, kale, and beets. Spinach, blackberries, and lemon peels were a failure – though the blackberries did yield an odd but beautiful shade of grey. I also colored quail eggs (especially interesting because they’re already covered in brown spots). Coloring brown eggs will give you really deep earth tones like burgundy and rust – also beautiful. They made some unusual-looking egg salad after the fact. I wrapped rubber bands around a few of the eggs to create asymmetrical lines around the eggs, just for variety.
Colored Eggs
Use one dozen hen’s eggs, and a half dozen quail eggs
Prep time: 1 hour
Deep Pink and Red:
Ingredients
- 2 medium red beets, grated
- 1 cup water
- 2 tablespoons vinegar
Directions
- Combine beets, water, and vinegar, and boil for 20 minutes.
- Add hard-boiled eggs to mixture and be prepared to pull the eggs out almost immediately if you want a pale pink egg; the longer the eggs stay in the beet juice, the stronger and deeper the shades.
- Using a brown egg will yield deep burgundy tones.
- The quail eggs will turn a rich Nantucket red-and-brown after about five minutes.
Yellow from yellow beets:
Ingredients
- 2 medium sized fresh yellow beets, grated
- 1 cup water
- 2 tablespoons vinegar
Directions
- Combine beets, water, and vinegar, and boil for 20 minutes.
- Add hard-boiled eggs to mixture and allow 20 minutes to get a pale yellow color, longer if you want it to be deeper.
Peach and Burnt Orange from onion skins:
Ingredients
- 6 onion peels (peels only, not the interior of the onion)
- 2 cups water
- 2 tablespoons vinegar
Directions
- Remove onion peels, place in a saucepan filled with water and vinegar and boil for 20 minutes.
- Soak 3-4 hard-boiled eggs in onion water.
- You will get peach eggs after about 3 minutes, rust-colored eggs after about 15 minutes, and a deep burnt orange if you use a brown egg instead of a white one.
Green from kale:
Ingredients
- 1 cup kale juice
- 1 cup water
- pinch of baking soda
- 2 tablespoons vinegar
Directions
- Combine ingredients in saucepan and cook on low heat for twenty minutes.
- Remove from heat, add hard-boiled eggs.
- You’ll get a light green color in about two minutes, and the eggs will become a deeper shade of green as they sit in the kale mixture.
- When using a quail egg the color turns a deep teal blue.
Grey from grape juice:
Ingredients
- 2 cups grape juice
- 2 tablespoons white vinegar
Directions
- Mix grape juice and white vinegar in a bowl.
- Add hard-boiled eggs and allow to sit for 30 minutes.
