Making Red Food Coloring from Beets

Make your own Natural Red Food Coloring!

 We recently learned we will have a new granddaughter in June.  To celebrate, we had a little family dinner party.  I wanted to serve a gluten free cake with pink icing, but I did not have any food coloring on hand.  Furthermore, I did not wish to use artificial food coloring, so I did a bit of research and made my own!

Fortunately, I already had beets on hand, so I peeled and chopped a medium sized beet. 

 

I just  barely covered the chopped beet with water and boiled it uncovered, so the water would evaporate - until the beets were tender and there was about half the water in the pan that I started with.

I set this aside to cool, then drained off the liquid.

  

I probably used about 1/2 teaspoon of the beet juice in my icing to make it nice and pink.

 

There was plenty of the red beet liquid leftover, so I poured it onto a baking sheet lined with plastic wrap.  This, I put into the freezer.  After it was frozen, I broke it up into small bits about 1/2 teaspoon each and put it into a ziplock bag - so the next time I want to make pink icing - I will have it on hand and will not need to make it from scratch!  I believe the beet liquid would gradually go brown in the refrigerator - so the freezer seemed like the way to go!  I'll let you know the next time I use it!

 Frozen concentrated beet liquid for use as natural food coloring