How To Naturally Dye Colored Easter Eggs
You may have noticed that JM2 does not sell the traditional WHITE egg. Did you know that different varieties of chickens lay different colored eggs? Ever seen a blue, pink, or green egg?
We have all of the colors! So now that you can get multicolored JM2 Farm Fresh eggs, how do you get the other fun colors for Easter? What about purple, yellow, red, orange and the different shades of each? We have your natural, kid safe dye options!
You will need:
- Medium and small sauce pan (pot with long handle)
- Water
- White Vinegar
- Hard-boiled eggs (JM2 eggs would be preferable)
- Beets
- Yellow Onion skins
- Turmeric
- Purple Cabbage
- Blueberries
- Red Onion skins
- Spinach
- Red Cooking Wine
We tried several different options, but this is what we liked best.
Red : We chopped 3 beets in a food processor, then boiled it in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. We filtered out the beet pieces, and let it cool to room temperature before we put the eggs in. We put 1 pink egg and 1 brown egg in the juice, and we put 1 egg in a separate cup of juice with 1 tbsp of vinegar.
Orange : We dehydrated 4 yellow onions rather than collecting skins from 4 onions. We boiled them in 2 cups of water for about 10 minutes. We removed the onions and let it cool to room temp before putting eggs in. We actually had difficulty with having enough liquid, and suggest collecting skins and using more water. We put 2 brown eggs in this dye, without vinegar.
Yellow : We boiled 2 tbsps of Turmeric in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. It turns a very bright yellow, and the Turmeric should mostly dissolve. We cooled it before adding eggs. We did 2 brown eggs in this dye. 1 cup had a tbsp of vinegar.
Green : We boiled 3 cups of Spinach in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. We removed the spinach and it cooled before adding eggs. We used 1 blue/green egg in one cup of dye, and 1 brown egg with dye and vinegar in another cup.
Blue : We used 2 cups of Welch's Concord Grape Juice. We didn't do anything extra with this. We put 1 blue egg and 1 brown egg in this dye.
Purple : We used 1 cup of red cooking wine. We didn't do anything with this wine. We have no idea if any alcohol content does actully get tranferred. We dyed 1 pink egg, and 1 brown egg in this dye.
Violet : We boiled 4 cups of blueberries in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. We made sure to mash them up and then removed them after the 10 minutes. We let it cool, then added 1 brown and 1 pink egg.
Teal : We chopped 2 cups of purple cabbage and boiled it in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. We then removed the cabbage. After it cooled, we added 1 brown egg with vinegar, and 1 blue and 1 green without vinegar.
Lavender : We dehydrated 6 red onions. Then, boiled them in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. We removed the onions, and had difficulty with volume again. We suggest collecting skins and using more water. After it cooled, we added 1 brown egg.
Little bug is still a bit too small to do this, but it would be so much fun to do with the kids. I have a few tips for you before you get started. First, boil your eggs while your dyes are cooling. Expect at least the morning to prepare the dyes. It takes a lot of time. We had 3 or 4 pots going the whole time, but it still took a very long time. We let our eggs sit overnight in the dye.
I suggest some kind of clothing cover. You could go to GoodWill and buy an old painting smock and roll up the sleeves. (we use this for everything) I also suggest using gloves. Latex gloves are very difficult to find in kids sizes, but we have just used smalls and tied the fingers and wrists.
The vinegar is supposed to help pull the natural color from the egg, but it seemed to also prevent the dye from bonding. We wouldn't suggest using the vinegar in the dye. Next time I hope to try another method where the egg sits in vinegar for a short time before going in the dye. If you do this, remember that vinegar eats at the shell and may completely soften it if left too long.
One recipe suggested using olive oil on the eggs after taking them out of the dye. This is intended to help keep the dye on the egg. We found that the dye came off rather easily, so this may be an option.
We also suggest doing all of this very close to the timing of your Easter Egg hunt. It seemed the longer the eggs sat after dying, the easier the dye came off.
They definitely didn't turn out perfect, but it is a fun way to use a natural dye for edible Easter eggs.
We saw another idea online to dye the whites of Deviled Eggs. They looked so cute in the picture that we just had to try it with these dyes. We used our favorite Deviled Egg recipe. In the step where you cut the egg and take out the yolk, we took the egg white and set it in the dye in the fridge for a couple of hours. This is how they turned out!
