This year we tried dying our hard boiled eggs with natural dyes! It was an interesting process, and another that definitely has a learning curve.

We roughly followed Fresh Egg Daily’s instructions, and bought blueberries, beets, yellow onions, turmeric (buying a small bag of this in the bulk section was less expensive), and purple cabbage. We halved the recipe in most cases, using only 2 cups of water and about 1.5 cups of veggies (or 1 Tbsp turmeric), and added 2 Tbsp vinegar, except for the purple cabbage. Now vinegar in the dye is what helps the dye set on the shell of the egg, but if you make a solution of purple cabbage juice acidic (which is what happens when you add vinegar), the liquid turns pink instead of blue, so I did not add vinegar to that jar. We also tried boiling the turmeric and purple cabbage together for the green color, then boiling them separately and adding about a cup of each liquid together in a different jar. I had already added the vinegar to the turmeric solution, so the “boiled separately” solution was a rusty brown (and I hid it in the pictures, because it was not a pretty color solution).

We put hard boiled eggs in each jar and refrigerated them longer than recommended. We pulled the blueberry and beet after 48 hours, and the others after 72 hours.

Results: I should have taken pictures of the blueberry dye and the beet dye right after I pulled them out of the solution, and then after I rinsed off the particulates. This picture is a day later, and the colors have started to go brown. The most surprising result was that even though the turmeric and purple cabbage solution color was brown, the eggs turned out green. The two darker green eggs had more vinegar in the solution. The purple cabbage solution without vinegar barely colored the eggs, but where there was a crack in the shell, definitely colored the egg white a blue color. I picked off a bit of shell on the beet dyed eggs as well to show the egg white color (no longer white).

Thanks for sticking with the length of this post. Here is a video of chicks learning to perch and fly as your reward.