Cornflowers-Ĭornflowers, or bachelor's buttons, are typically bright blue. Try substituting them in your potato recipes. Packed with anthocyanins, purple potatoes have a leg up over white and yellow potatoes on the nutrient front. All of this makes them a great way to add some unusual color to a plate, without having to worry too much about the pH. Purple potatoes are also not very susceptible to bleeding their colors out. And, exposed to high concentrations of acid, purple potatoes bleach and turn a very light purple- not anything like that intense purple in the raw potatoes. Cooked purple potatoes are susceptible to color changes from acid, but much less so than red cabbage or blueberries. I'm reaching the limits of my chemistry knowledge here, but this color change is of a different nature than other acid/base changes. Purple potatoes are a vibrant purple when they are raw, but when they are cooked, the balance turns to a brilliant blue-purple. If you add it to an acidic food, it will go right back to purple. but remember that the color can still change. Use it with a light touch to add blue to icings, cake batters and cookies. Now you have a blue dye, As unappetizing as boiled cabbage and baking soda sounds, the flavor of the dye really is not that pronounced. Small amounts of baking soda have a negligible effect on taste, but add to much and it will taste terrible. It is important to add only enough baking soda not only for the color, but for the flavor. Keep adding baking soda in very small amounts until the color just turns blue. Add just the tiniest pinch of baking powder (you really have to go slowly here or you can turn the whole batch green). Strain out the cabbage, reduce the liquid until it is thick and syrupy (the cooking liquid from a whole cabbage will reduce to about a quarter of a cup. To make a blue food dye, slice up red cabbage leaves and boil for 10-15 minutes. Cooked red cabbage leaves will eventually turn bluish purple if soaked in a slightly basic solution. Red cabbage is the most common natural blue food coloring here in the States. Try substituting blue cornmeal for yellow cornmeal in cornbread or tortillas. In acidic conditions blue corn will appear purple, in basic conditions it will be more blue. Blue Corn-īlue varieties of corn are packed with anthocyanins. To avoid this discoloration either decrease the baking soda/powder in the recipe or add more acid, such as lemon juice or buttermilk. Blueberries will even turn green if they are exposed to too much of a base, such as in a pancake batter or muffin mix. With blueberries, I usually find the flavor much more important than the color, and the flavor is better when it is acidic. The pigment in the skin is blue at a neutral pH, but turns red when exposed to the acid of the berries. Blue/Purple Anthocyanins Blueberries-īlueberries look blue when you pick them, but then they turn red/purple when they are crushed. So put on your lab goggles, pull out your pH strips and get ready for some weird, blue food adventures. I've grouped these blue foods into Anthocyanins (the color changers) and others. And there are a few exceptions to the variable anthocyanin rule that will allow you different cooking techniques but still give a little blue. So how are you supposed to cook with blue? Well, there are a few exceptions- foods and preparation methods that introduce little enough acid to keep the hue blue (and cheating here and there with a pinch of baking soda). And there's one big catch to this whole fun pH color changing thing: nearly all foods are acidic. And if you have a purple food and add acid? Odds are it will turn red. So you've found a blue food? Odds are, if you add an acid it will turn purple. Most color changing anthocyanins will lean toward the blue/purple range in basic conditions and lean toward the purple/red range in acidic ones. Red cabbage is the classic example- it can turn bright red, purple, blue or dark blue-green depending on the acidity it is exposed to. Most anthocyanins have unstable pigments that are affected by the pH they are exposed to. Most of the blue foods that I'm discussing get their pigments from anthocyanins. Researching and testing for this article I felt a little like a mad scientist- (pH strips, mold, simmering pots of blue liquid). But with blue, things are going to get weird. Up until this point the color study has been able to focus on relatively normal plant foods, and how to keep them colorful. But with the scarcity of naturally blue foods, you have to take what you can get, so forgive me if some of the foods on my list are merely blueish. And among foods that are called blue, few of them have a purely blue (not purplish or greenish) pigment. Blue is notoriously scarce in the palette of natural foods.
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