What would food be like without color? Pretty bland for sure. Also, it would be very hard to determine whether food is good or has gone bad, whether it’s ripe or whether it’s sour or sweet. We use color a lot to make judgment calls on food.
Color is also full of chemistry, there are a lot of different molecules and phenomena that play a role in giving a product color.
Browse through our archives to learn more about color in food!
Have you had cooked red beetroots turn an unappetizing brown color? Luckily, there’s a simple way to keep cooked beetroots red. All you need is some acid! We regularly do science experiments in our kitchen. Most of them are done…
Want to give your red cabbage salad a nice vibrant pinkish color? Just sprinkle in a little lime juice and your previously purple cabbage will turn pink! Or, to lighten up your cooked cabbage, add a few pieces of apple…
Have you ever wondered why some potatoes brown easily upon frying or baking, while others remain a pale yellow? Good news: you can influence this browning process yourself. According to theory, at least… Of course, we put this to the…
Would you buy a raw brown steak? What about a blue apple? Green coconut flakes? Or a grey orange? Probably not. If the color of food isn’t ‘right’ consumers won’t buy it anymore, even if it is perfectly safe and…
The ‘secret’ behind that yellow dal, yellow rice, or beautifully colored curry? A decent chance that it’s turmeric. A mere teaspoon can help color a sauce or dish and it’s not just used in savory dishes. In some countries it…
The other day, having some rhubarb left and not wanting to make a rhubarb pie, cake or crumble (>90% of rhubarb recipes online seem to be for one of those!), I decided to try a rhubarb ice cream. I had…
There is a very easy way to distinguish a fresh uncooked shrimp from a cooked one: its colour. If you’ve ever cooked shrimp before, you will have noticed this colour transformation. The shrimp will convert from a blue, translucent colour…
Kale leaves shrink when they’re cooked, eggplants turn into a delicious mush and pumpkins can be transformed into a rich puree. Broccoli on the other hand doesn’t change size at all when cooked. It will still be a stem with…
In what feels like decades ago in social media lifetimes, mirror glazes were quite the hype in 2016. Beautifully shiny and colorful glazed cakes were everywhere. Whether they were space or galaxy-themed, simply stylish, or brightly colored, they looked amazing…
Have you ever noticed how fruits and vegetables have a wide variety of colours? The spectrum goes from orange to purple to green to bright red. It’s amazing how nature has developed all these bright and beautiful colours in order…
Whoever decided to make red velvet cookies with dark cocoa powder must have had some strong bright red coloring. Coloring a dark brown recipe to become red is a lot harder than coloring a simple whitish batter or cookie dough. Real…
Carrots are orange, aren’t they? No, not necessarily! Purple and yellow carrots are a relatively new variation of carrots in our supermarket (at least in my perception, until I found out it’s actually the purple ones that were there before…