[Sca-cooks] Coloring bread...

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Mercy Neumark wrote:

> Hello All!
>
> I thought it would be a cute idea (evile plans of mice and arte, it seems)
> if when I make my bread for Yule, that I color it possibly green/red/blue or
> any combination there of.  Spoke to someone who told me not to use food
> coloring for said project because the coloring would probably turn lighter
> (like olive green instead of the bright green I was hoping for).

I've never seen it do that in response to heat. But if you want a good
deep color, rather than pastel, you'd need enough color that you might
taste it in the bread, especially red, which is usually fairly bitter. A
trick for red color is to start with chocolate and go from there, but
you'd taste that in the bread as well.

When I was a child, my mother bought some white bread from the bakery that
had been dyed bright green for St. Patrick's Day. It looked, well,
odd. Like the purple and yellow swirl bread you can find around here
during football season. *shudder*

>
> So, anyone have suggestions on what to use to dye the bread different
> colors?  Read a recipe for some red pears using red sandalwood for the
> coloring...is using this a possibility?  Anything else?  My friend suggested
> maybe using dill as a colorant, but it isn't exactly the effect (and our
> baroness is allergic to just about anything, so I'm afraid to use dill).

Dill would be green flecks. Not really the same thing. Go use Selene's
juicer and use fruit/vegetable juice, or you could try powder instead
(King Arthur Flour, as a possible source), or the saunders. Saunders will
give you a very different red than will beets, certainly.

 >
> Also this same bread, I was going to use the machet recipe...and possibly do
> salt crusted since its an accompaniment to Pate which isn't very salty (I
> don't want to overload it with salt).  Saltines tastes very yummy with the
> first try, but I don't want to serve it with crackers...ANYHOW, to do salt
> encrusted with bread, just make bread and spread salt across the top just
> before you bake it (it's an uncooked loaf by that time), right?
>
> There are those colored sugars that bakers use on cookies...do you think
> using this on a bread might be interesting to accompany a somewhat sweet
> chicken liver pate?  What do you all think?
>
> --Artemesia

It would be, um, different. You'd need an egg wash, to make the sugar
stick, and enough sugar to see the color would be a noticeable sweetness
on the bread. You could also use period colorings in the egg wash if you
just wanted to paint the bread.

Margaret