My Egg-Coloring Experiment

Georgia (Sakartvelo) is on Orthodox Julian calendar for religious holidays, which means that Easter was celebrated here on April 12, a week after the Gregorian calendar that most western Christian churches use.

Fun fact: Russia is also on Orthodox calendar and this year Easter fell on the Cosmonautics Day, a professional holiday celebrating Gagarin's first space flight. This created lots of memes on the Internet making fun of how modern Russia is trying to combine religion and science. Here's my favorite:

There's a lot of symbolism in this meme: the cathedral in the shape of the space rocket has the letters XB on it, for "Christ's risen!" and the eggs are decorated with rockets and Soviet symbols. Sputnik is featured right next to the Soviet red star on the cathedral instead of a cross.

But the funniest part is the text on top. Gagarin, seconds before the launch, has famously said "Poehali!" ("Let's go!"). In the meme they've added the word "Indeed" from the traditional Orthodox Easter greeting exchange: when someone says on Easter "Christ Has Risen!" you are supposed to respond, "Indeed, He has risen!" So "Indeed, Let's go!" makes a very clever and funny combination of the two holidays in the meme.

I celebrate Easter as a part of my cultural heritage rather than religious faith. For me, the best part of the holiday is the pastry and colored eggs. My mom and sister were supposed to arrive in Tbilisi right on Easter (they got stuck on the famous Military Road connecting Russia and Georgia because of snow and potential avalanches in the mountains and had to reroute, losing two days on the road, but that's a different story). So I wanted to do something to share the holiday with them as they are much more traditional in that sense than I am. I was hoping to take my mom to a Georgian church for the Easter service.

Anyway, with my latest resolution to go as natural in my life as possible, I decided to use only natural coloring for the eggs. When I was growing up, my grandmother used beets for red and onion peel for brownish yellow to color the eggs. I wanted to see if I could get some other colors as well. My research online suggested that turmeric can be used to achieve bright yellow, turmeric mixed with red cabbage - green, and red cabbage on its own - blue.

So I went to the store and bought 30 white eggs and a head of red cabbage, two small beets and turmeric powder. I couldn't find 9% acidity pure vinegar that was needed to fasten the color, so I bought 5% apple vinegar.

I shredded beets and red cabbage and put them into separate pots to boil and started another pot with turmeric. You are supposed to be boiling them for 10-15 minutes to achieve the deepest color, and oh boy did they all look wonderfully rich in color when boiling: deep red in beets, very thick blue from red cabbage, and bright yellow-orange from turmeric.

Online sources suggested that hot eggs absorb color better, so I started boiling eggs almost at the same time as coloring pots. I split the red cabbage into two portions and added turmeric to the second one to achieve green. Then I added apple vinegar to every color as instructed for better absorption.

I immediately regretted that as the colors of course changed, becoming paler. The deep red in beets became dirty pink, and blue from red cabbage - paler and grayer. The blue from red cabbage mixed with turmeric actually turned brown. I don't know if it's because I didn't use the traditional white vinegar but I was disappointed. I probably should have cooled the colors as well.

Anyway, the eggs in the picture are as they came out: bluish gray from the red cabbage alone, kinda greenish yellow from red cabbage plus turmeric, dirty purple from red beets, and yellow/orange from turmeric alone.

Oh well, they are colored. Naturally.

Next time, I will try to color the brown eggs along with white ones to see if there will be any difference. And I will try to find the 9% white vinegar.