Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Dye testing part 1

Over the holidays I started experimenting with dyes. Combinations of the following were tested:


1. Type of dye
2. Temperature of the dye (hot or cold)
3. Whether the egg was raw or had been boiled

Dyes to test are food coloring, commercial Easter egg dye, Ukrainian Easter egg (pysanky) dye, RIT and Tintex clothing dyes. I started with the first three.

I wanted to test raw as well as boiled eggs because I assumed boiling would have an effect on at least the cuticle covering the shell. In the spirit of the proceedings, I used the instructions provided on the PAAS website for hard cooking eggs:

How to prepare the perfect hard-cooked egg


• Place eggs in single layer in saucepan. Add water to at least 1” above eggs.
• Cover. Quickly bring just to boiling. Turn off heat.
• If necessary, remove pan from burner to prevent further boiling. Let eggs stand, covered, in the hot water for 15 minutes for large eggs (12 minutes for medium eggs, 18 for extra large eggs).
• Immediately run cold water over eggs or place them in ice water until completely cooled.

Tips for preparing hard-cooked eggs:

• Only cook one layer of eggs at a time. Rapidly boiling water causes the eggs to bump against one another, which is more likely to cause cracking.
• To avoid cracking as well as the harmless, greenish ring around hard-cooked yolks, avoid over-cooking. Also, cool the eggs quickly after cooking by running cold water over them or placing them in ice water until completely cooled.
• Once eggs have cooled, refrigerate them in their shells until use.
• Hard-cooked eggs in the shell can be refrigerated up to one week. Hard-cooked eggs out of the shell should be used immediately.

They turned out very nice, so I prepared a delicious egg salad.

Food coloring

First up was food coloring. I used McCormick, mainly because it’s the easiest to find, but also because I like the little bottles. And there are instructions for dyeing eggs right on the box!
Mix ½ cup boiling water, 1 tsp. vinegar and 10 to 20 drops Food Color in a cup to achieve desired color or use the chart above. Repeat for each color. Dip hard-cooked eggs into dye 5 minutes or longer.

Red                                20
Yellow                            20
Green                             20
Blue                               20
Pretty Purple       5 Red + 15 Blue
Orange Sunset  17 Yellow + 3 Red
Teal                   5 Blue + 15 Green
Mint Green      14 Green + 6 Yellow
Dusty Rose          14 Red + 6 Blue

I mixed basic red and blue because a) I had red and blue of each dye type and b) I plan on testing sun fading later, and red tends to be a color that fades in sunlight. The results for red are below. From top left to bottom right, a boiled shell in cold dye; a raw shell in cold dye; a boiled shell in hot dye; a raw shell in hot dye. The raw shell in hot dye is a little deeper, but not incredibly. The difference may be because the dye was hot, but it could be just as easily attributed to chemical or structural differences in the shells.



Pretty much the same results with blue – not much difference among the samples. The boiled shell in cold water was not quite as deep. Over all the food dye did a good job – a nice range of tones and colors, keeping the texture of the eggshell. Because of the transparency of the dyes, different shell colors will produce different results – brown eggs with red or yellow dyes can result in a nice range of brown tones.

Easter egg dye

I managed to find some off-season Paas Classic Easter Egg Dye. The Paas company has been making egg dye for over 100 years. Basically, it’s food dye compressed into a tablet. Mix it with vinegar and water and you’re ready to plunk the eggs in. The dyes are mixed, and the colors are not readily apparent based on the appearance of the tablets.

The red and blue shells on the right (below) are from raw eggs. This dye is intended for boiled eggs, but the color is definitely richer on the raw shells.




Pysanky dye

Pysanky dye – dye used for Ukrainian Easter eggs – is a more concentrated and definitely not food grade dye. It comes in little foil pouches packed in little paper envelopes. It is very concentrated and will stain (see my blue fingers, bottom).


In the pictures below, from left to right: food dye, Pass, and pysanky. The pysanky dye is definitely deeper, and will get a little deeper with additional soaking (additional time isn’t as effective with the other dyes). Also black pysanky dye is available - not so with the other dyes – they just aren’t rich enough to produce a deep black.



I originally intended to find out which of these dyes work better, but, looking at these samples, the variety of color and tones is much more interesting to me. I’ll probably end up using a little of each.


Still to test – RIT and Tintex dyes, and a simple fading test.




1 comment:

  1. ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! OVERWHELMING PATIENCE,SKILL AND CREATIVITY. BREATHTAKING!.

    ReplyDelete