How to Make Beautiful Colored Pasta
In the past month, I have been having a lot of fun experimenting with coloring fresh pasta dough and using that to create unique, intricate designs such as tiger stripes, crisscross design, Italian flag striped, and even managed to do a rainbow striped agnolotti.
However, I feel like it’s about time I dive a bit deep into how I create such amazing colors, so that’s what I will get into today.
There are many fun and flavorful ways that you can dye pasta dough that don’t just include food coloring, I do like food coloring for things like cookies and cakes, but for pasta I like the way natural food dyes look in the finished product, so I’m going to share with you a few options to hopefully take your fresh pasta game to another level.
The Colorful Options
Before diving into any sort of recipe, I’d like to share with you the sorts of natural food dyes that I like to use and also some other options that you can try. By the way, if I want white pasta then I’d just use a regular pasta dough.
Red-For red pasta, I like to use beetroot, what I’ll do is take some cooked red beet, blend them with some eggs and mix that with flour to form my dough. You can certainly cook some beetroots yourself, but I find the pre-cooked beets you get at the grocery store to be much more convenient.
Now, the beet does give you more of a pink hue, so some other options would be paprika, Kashmiri red chili, or tomato powder
Orange-When I want orange pasta, my go-to is tomato paste, I feel like the red paste blends together with the yellow egg yolks beautifully to get you…orange. For each portion, I’ll take about an egg yolk sized ball of tomato paste and beat that into my eggs to make my dough.
Yellow-For yellow pasta, I like to use ground turmeric, turmeric is a member of the ginger family and is best known for bringing out a vibrant yellow hue plus an earthy flavor for things like curries and rice dishes. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could bloom some saffron threads in hot water, but that’s a bit excessive for my taste.
Green-There are quite a few ways to make green pasta like with matcha powder, but I prefer earthy and nutritious spinach leaves. Other leafy greens like collards or mustard greens could work, but spinach is my go-to. What I will do is take a handful of raw spinach leaves, blend those with some eggs in a food processor, and add some flour to that. I’ve heard that some chefs use cooked spinach for this, but I find that blending the spinach raw gives you the most vibrant color.
Blue-It’s always fascinated me how, as far as food goes, blue seems to be the rarest of them all as far as natural colors go. Sure, blueberries exist, but when you mash them up they do turn purple. I have attempted to make blue pasta using cabbage juice blended with a bit of baking soda and, while it works…it’s a pain.
Fortunately, I was able to come across one option: blue spirulina algae powder. Spirulina has been recognized for it’s anti-inflammatory properties, and the blue powder that I found seems to make perfect blue pasta with little fuss. Another good option would be butterfly pea flower powder.
Purple-While purple isn't that rare in food, figuring out a natural way to dye pasta purple seemed like a tall order to me, that was until I stumbled upon purple sweet potato powder, which seemed to do the trick!
Black-Black pasta might seem like something you’d see at high end Italian restaurants, but I have found that there is a way to easily dye your pasta black at home: activated charcoal powder. I know it might sound odd, but the charcoal powder really does dye the pasta a gorgeous black color.
Now, there are some health risks behind using charcoal powder, you certainly wouldn’t want to consume it if you’re on certain medications so you may want to speak to your doctor about it. I have also heard that squid ink can be used for pasta but…how many of us want to deal with squid ink?
Now it’s time to put that all into recipes.
Each batch is good for 4 servings of pasta
For the Basic white dough:
400g (14oz) 00 flour, or all purpose flour, plus more for dusting
4 large eggs
For each Color:
(Red) 1 small cooked beetroot (about 2 oz), also use one less egg as that beet will give added moisture
(Orange) 1/4 cup tomato paste
(Yellow) 1 1/2tsp ground turmeric
(Green) 4oz baby spinach leaves
(Blue) 1 1/2tsp blue spirulina algae or butterfly pea flower powder
(Purple) 1 1/2tsp purple sweet potato powder
(Black) 1 1/2tsp activated charcoal powder
Dump the flour into a mound and use your fingers to create a well.
For red or green, dump the beetroot/spinach into a food processor with the eggs and blend until the mixture is smooth and add that to the flour well. For the other colors, add the eggs to the well along with your chosen coloring ingredient.
Use a fork to beat the eggs a bit and begin to slowly incorporate the flour until the mixture thickens to the point where your fork isn’t doing much.
Use your hands to bring the remaining flour together and knead the mixture into a smooth, elastic dough, it’ll take about 5 minutes.
From there, you can roll out, shape, and/or cut the dough how you please. As for how to make more intricate designs, well that’s for another article.
