Flower-Color Dyed Eggs

“Oh, my fur and whiskers! I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!”

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get,” said the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, and so here I am, the week after Easter when all the egg-cellent pastel-colored merchandise is no doubt being discounted or discarded, maybe some decorations packed away for another year in some part of the Easter-marking world–and this recipe for using garden flowers to color eggs pops out of the rabbit hole.

I owe this one to Colleen over at Grow Forage Cook Ferment, who, of course, was timelier by far than I. I’ve adapted her process only slightly to use fresh flowers instead of dried herbs that are intended for teas, and to encourage all you good eggs out there to forage for your blossoms, or use what you can find in the natural world around you rather than looking online for specific teas to buy.

Because this isn’t just about coloring eggs, it’s about finding edible colors in the living flora around you, wherever you may be.

And because honestly this process is not guaranteed to produce the same results each time, so it’s not as though your hibiscus-stained egg is necessarily going to look anything like mine. The quality of the flower color matters, the water matters, the mordant matters and above all the eggs matter–these things are not the same everywhere, nor would we want them to be. You may’s well find your own local seasonal flowers or herbs, dry them or make fresh pots of color by steeping them in hot water, add your mordants and/or modifiers, and see what each batch brings. The whole process is one of discovery and surprise. But though the colors and effects are not guaranteed, the joy of the process most certainly is, and the results will almost certainly be wonderful, whatever they are.

And you can then have egg salads for supper!

What you’ll need

1. Eggs, of course, preferably white. How many is entirely up to you.
2. Jars, wide enough for you to be able to pick the eggs out with fingers and deep enough for more than 1 egg, if you want. I used regular old jam jars–Bonne Maman was my reference, 270 mL/ 9 oz.
3. A wire-rack to dry the eggs out
4. An assortment of fresh flowers that are known colorants. I prefer to use edible flowers because these are going onto eggs after all, and even hairline cracks can cause seepage. Here are my locally available possibilities; you will need about 1 big handful of each per jam jar, give-or-take, to color 1-2 eggs.
   • செம்பருத்தி/ Chemparutthi/Hibiscus
   • சங்குப்பூ/ Shanku Pushpam/Butterfly pea
   • சாமந்தி பூ/ Saamandi poo/ Chrysanthemum
   • ஆவாரம்பூ/ Aavaaram/ Tanner’s Cassia
   • செண்டிகைப்பூ/ Chendigai poo/Marigold
   • பவளமல்லிகைப்பூ/ Pavazhamalli/ Coral Jasmine or Night blooming Jasmine
   • பன்னீர் ரோஜா/ Panneer rose
   • துளசி/ Tulasi or holy basil
   • கொன்றைப்பூ/ Konraipoo/ Indian laburnum
   • Among non-floral but other kitchen vegetal & spice color sources: you can try beetroots and there’s always turmeric, fresh or powdered. Maybe even a nice rich Kashmiri or Byadgi chilli powder!
5. Mordants of your choice. I’ve listed the common ones used in dyeing but really the only choice for culinary use is just alum.
   • What’s a mordant? From the French mordre, or “to bite”; used to describe a biting sense of humor or the molecular “biting” of dye fixatives. The latter are substances–inorganic oxides, ions, or any chemical molecule really that binds a chemical dye and holds it down or weights it such that it fixes or, indeed, bites, into a material like cloth or, in this case, egg shells. The process is called mordanting.
   • Alum (படிகாரம்/padikaram, phitkari, Potassium aluminum sulfate) is the most common, non-toxic and inexpensive of mordants. It’s used to make kumkuma and is what I’ve used in my experiment below. Can give brighter colors when combined with Cream of Tartar or Tartaric acid.
   • Aluminum Acetate and Aluminum sulfate, along with alum are all derived from bauxite or aluminium ore; Titanium oxalate (traditionally used for tanning leather) are also common mordants, but I’d not use these last three because of toxicities [Source].
6. Modifiers of your choice
   • What’s a modifier? These are pH changers. The list below is for your general knowledge, but the easiest to find and the safest ones for culinary use are the first four. Acidic modifiers produce more red and yellow tones, alkaline ones will tend to dark greens and blues. The modifiers change chemical bonds such that they reflect longer wavelengths (reds) or shorter ones (blues) to our eyes.
   1. Vinegar/Acetic acid: lowers the pH of a dyebath
   2. Citric Acid: weakly acidic, reduces pH mildly. Can substitute with lemon juice.
   3. Tartaric Acid: lowers pH. Occurs naturally in grapes, banana, tamarind; synthesized first by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1769.
   4. Cream of Tartar/ Potassium Bitartrate–tartaric acid + potassium hydroxide. Lowers pH. Synthetically produced. Powdery compared to crystalline tartaric acid, weaker.
   5. Iron/Ferrous Sulfate: raises pH, edible as an iron supplement, changes yellows to greens.
   6. Chalk/Calcium Carbonate: raises pH, inedible
   7. Soda Ash/Sodium Carbonate: raises pH but is inedible

Here’s what I did

I used chrysanthemums, Tanner’s cassia/aavaaram, hibiscus and butterfly pea/shanku pushpam. Not being entirely convinced the yellow aavaaram would color deeply enough, I did only 1 jar of that and 1 jar of the other yellow, chrysanthemum. I had two jars each, hibiscus and shanku pushpam–1 each with vinegar, 1 each with alum.

And here were my results:

Notes and observations:

1. Yellow chrysanthemum + alum = green!
2. Yellow aavaaram + vinegar = almost orangey brown. Parts of the aavaaram tree are used in leather tanning; hence the name Tanner’s cassia. Seeing the color on the eggshell made me think of natural leather tones.
3. My biggest surprise was with hibiscus: purple with alum, a speckled brown-grey with vinegar.
4. Shanku pushpam + alum = almost a white egg, maybe just a very pale bluish tint.
5. But shanku pushpam + vinegar = a wonderful sky blue.
6. But shanku pushpam + vinegar also = some green-browns, and I’m not fully sure why the difference. Of the two blue eggs in the image above, the pure sky blue one (bottom right) was not cracked. The other blue, slightly above it, was. It was also the one sitting higher in the jar, a bit exposed to headspace. Maybe that made a difference.

Step 1: Collect the flowers, prepare your teas.

You have 2 choices here, working with fresh flowers: use them fresh or use them dried.

If you have enough flowers in a single collection, it’s easier to make these fresh. If you have only a few each day, drying them makes sense. Depending on how many flowers you are working with, you might end up doing both.

Shanku pushpam or butterfly pea just takes some warm-to-hot water poured over top, as you can see from this prior post. The same works for hibiscus. Coral jasmine is wonderful to work with, but the collection process can take long because it’s just those tiny stalks that are the source of color.

Whatever your choices, the tea-making process is thus: place 1 handful of the fresh flowers (or equivalent dried) in a jar, and pour about 1 cup or 1 1/2 cups of water over top. Cap and let this steep for some hours and up to overnight, refrigerated. Repeat for all the other handfuls of flowers. Once you have a nice rich color, strain out the soggy flowers, and return the colored liquid to the jar. Refrigerate until ready to work with your eggs.

Step 2: Choose your eggs, and boil them

Since this is a dyeing process, white eggs are preferable to brown. If you are using brown eggs, try them with hibiscus+vinegar, which seemed to produce darker colorations in both my run as Colleen’s.

I used the regular country chicken eggs we get around here, which I almost never manage to hardboil without cracking their shells. I tried placing them in a steamer basket and steaming them instead of immersing in water, but will still mixed results. Our eggs generally tend to be “runnier” and with much more fragile yolks than any we ever had in Houston, so this part of the process was a bit hit-or-miss, too.

Never mind egg salad for just one dinner, we’ve had egg salads and sandwiches for a few dinners now *cough*.

I gave in and used the eggs that had just cracked and not actually oozed in the steaming process.

Step 3: Add mordant and modifiers

For each jar of colored liquid, add

• 1 teaspoon of alum OR
• 1 tablespoon of any of the edible modifiers listed above OR
• both alum and modifier

It’s fun to design an experiment around this, as we did with the little Chinese ginger milk puddings some posts ago. Some ideas:

• Work only with 1 flower like hibiscus or shanku pushpam and prepare several jars of tea with the flowers. Then add to each: alum, vinegar, alum+vinegar, alum+citric acid/lime juice, alum+tartaric acid .. etc.
• Work with several flowers and prepare 2 jars of tea each. To the first jar, add alum. To the second jar add alum+an edible modifier of your choice from the list above.
  • Colleen used alum in one set of jars, and vinegar in the other set. That’s an option, too. And since I was doing this for the first time, I followed that lead, but I might well get more adventurous on next rounds because this is fun 🙂

Whatever combinations of mordants and modifiers you choose to add, mix your liquids well–and label them. Clear space in the fridge for them!

Step 4: Add the eggs

Make sure the boiled eggs have cooled completely and then add them gently to each jar. Refrigerate overnight or for a full day.

Step 5: Check color

After about 12 hours, you can pick the eggs out of their jars and check their coloration. Dry them on a wire rack and see if you like the colors — or return them for up to 12 more hours to their jars and the refrigerator.

Once you’re satisfied, dry them out again & enjoy the colored eggs of your labor! As you see from the images below, unless there are cracks in the shells, the color does not penetrate the shells. And because we’ve used only edible flowers and non-toxic mordants and modifiers, what’s within are still perfectly normal incredible edible eggs.

Eggs dyed with fresh flower colors

These eggs are dyed with extracts made from fresh flowers—a great way to get to know what flowers are edible in your local environments, and to know what colors they produce! Use a mordant and/or a choice of modifiers to create a wide range of possible color combinations. This is a fun weekend project to do with kids! Recipe adapted from Colleen’s on Grow, Forage, Cook, Ferment.

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Equipment

• 6 9oz jam jars
• A wire rack for drying eggs

Ingredients

  

• 6-12 eggs, hard boiled but unpeeled
• 6 handfuls of fresh edible flowers of your choosing: butterfly pea, hibiscus, chrysanthemums, aavaaram, amaltas/konraipoo, tulasi, marigold, coral jasmine, desi gulab or rose
• 1 teaspoon powdered alum/padiharam/fitkari per jar
• 1 tablespoon liquid color modifier (vinegar, lime juice) OR
• 1 teaspoon powdered modifier (citric acid, cream of tartar, tartaric acid).

Instructions

 

Prepare the colored teas

• Place 1 handful of the fresh flowers (or equivalent dried) in a jar, and pour about 1- 1½ cups of water over top. Cap and let this steep for some hours and up to overnight, refrigerated. Repeat for all the other handfuls of flowers.
• Once you have a nice rich color, strain out the soggy flowers, and return the colored liquid to the jar. Refrigerate until ready to work with your eggs.
• If you have only small collections of flowers daily, you can either keep adding them to a refrigerated jar with a little water until you have a rich enough color [on the final addition, add some very hot water to finish the color extraction process]. Alternatively, you can set them out to dry and prepare the tea in one go.

Steep the eggs

• Lay out your jars of colored teas. Decide what combinations of alum and color modifiers you want to add to each.
• Use 1 teaspoon alum per jar AND/OR 1 tablespoon of liquid modifiers (vinegar, lime juice) OR 1 teaspoon of any of the powders (citric acid, cream of tartar, tartaric acid). Mix well.
• Gently add 1-2 boiled and unpeeled eggs to each jar. Refrigerate overnight.
• The next morning, gently remove each egg and lay on a wire drying rack. If you’re satisfied with the coloration, you can stop here.
• Alternatively, return the eggs to their respective jars, and allow to steep again for up to an additional 12 hours.
• Remove the eggs gently and dry completely on a wire rack.