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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Aug 30, 2010 23:34:54 GMT -5
Today i did an interesting experiment. I boiled a pot full of saved, but dried purple corn husks. I wanted to see if i could save the purple color for something neat later on. I don't really know what i will use it for, but it was a fun experiment anyway. It seemed to go well. I was able to extract most of the purple color from the corn husks. It may need to be boiled down and evaporated some more if i actually want to use it as a natural food colouring substitute, but it may provide other uses just as it is. I found this neat website on a quick Google search. They provide an interesting example of using red color from flowers to dye pasta red. The pasta looks delicious. hubpages.com/hub/make-food-coloringMy purple corn water is interesting because it has only a slight, and almost undetectable scent of corn, and also contains a slight and almost undetectable sweet aroma. Practically no smell at all. It may provide to be a better colouring than the red cabbage, because i would imagine you would get a cabbage flavour from the cabbage water. My method may avoid that undesirable extra flavour. I plan to experiment more with it in the future.
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 31, 2010 7:28:53 GMT -5
Yep, you certainly can use the stuff as food coloring. What you did is basically the same as what is done when one makes a batch of chicha morado(the soft drink, not the beer) except in that case its purple corn kernels not corn husks. As far as I can tell (at least following the recipie I got) the only thing the corn adds to chicha is the color, all of the flavor comes from the other ingrediants (the apples the pineapple the spices etc.) the recipies I follwed doesnt event ask you to grind the corn, or even take it off the cob!. As and added bonus the purple coloring in corn comes from anthocyanins, which means that, unlike conventional foodcoloring this stuff is probably actually good for your health!
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Post by Walk on Sept 1, 2010 7:33:50 GMT -5
There is a flour corn listed in the SSE yearbook by WA HA L, Painted Mountain (purple husk) that they say they use for a wool dye, with dye recipe provided upon request. Sounds like you're onto the same quest.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Sept 4, 2010 0:48:27 GMT -5
haha. Interesting. I should try making chica morado out of some.
yeah, i suppose you could dye cloth with it. But i wonder how much you would need to use since it's water soluble. Or are ALL dyes water soluble, but they just use them in concentrated amounts to make "permanent" colors?
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Post by grunt on Sept 4, 2010 2:58:36 GMT -5
You fix the colors by washing the died cloth in water with vinegar added = and I don't remember how much vinegar you have to use.
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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 4, 2010 18:33:21 GMT -5
Alum, Tannic acid, and salt are also popular traditional mordants (the tecnicaly term for the stuff that "fixes" the dye. The mordant can also change the resultat color of the dyed cloth as can the PH of the solution. I suggest you do a little web reaseach to figure out which combo works best for your needs.
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 31, 2010 18:09:42 GMT -5
I finally got a decent digital camera in preparation for 2011. Figured I'd post a picture of the jar of Anthocyanin corn-husk water. ...Also having been in the refrigerator for a while... I think it is starting to become carbonated.... I'm starting to wonder if it is fermenting... Wikipedia says that Anthocyanins are actually a type of sugar, so i suppose it's possible it could ferment.
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Post by blueadzuki on Dec 31, 2010 18:31:13 GMT -5
For the record, I've done a few colorants myself (though mine are wood alcohol based so they're not for food). I have a bottle bright yellow alcohol based gamboge, (mine is actually made out of the yellow sap drips I picked off of mangosteens as I ate them (official gamobge is made from many members of Garcinia, but G. mangostana ususally isn't one of them. I also have a pint bottle of turkey red dye, courtesty of a small bag of slivers of brazil wood I found in the botanica section of my local Latin Supermarket (apparently, besides being used as a dyewood and to make really expensive violin bows, pau de Brasil heartwood chips are also used as a medicine, if you throw them in boilng water and drink the resulatant tea, it's supposed to keep your heart healthy) I haven't yet used either one so I don't know how strong they actually are (though due to a small spill I am aware the brazil one is capable of turning a pair of white sweatsocks permanently orange.) but at some point I probably will.
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Post by mnjrutherford on Dec 31, 2010 22:19:51 GMT -5
um, where did you get the mangosteens? Did you grow them?
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Post by blueadzuki on Dec 31, 2010 23:22:12 GMT -5
Nah, I just live close enough to a major city to have acess to a Chinatown; around March-April, bags of them tend to show up at the street fruit markets.
Actually the mangosteens are about the only fruit I find there whose pits I haven't been able to grow (I'm fairly sure that they are still mostly frozen en route. I I ever find some of those new ones that are coming out of S. America, I may buy one (even if they are expensive) just to see if the seed will grow). Thne again I've heard that Mangosteens aren't east to grow from seed even if you can get seed to germinate and takes a very long time to fruit if you do. And all mangosteen trees are identical of each other (the crossed embyos are ALWAYS outgrown in nature by Parthenocarpic ones so the seeds are perfect genetic copies of each other) so any breeding effort would be futile by definition.
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Post by bobinthebul on Jan 4, 2011 7:12:08 GMT -5
For dying plant fibers you can use alum as a mordant or acid, they often give different effects. Some processes even use both. For wool or other animal fibers, it's almost always acid. Vinegar works, so does citric acid and others. A pigment that looks one color in the plant may give quite a different result on the fiber dyed! Mangosteen - I've germinated them before without much trouble (but yeah, pre-frozen ones won't grow, and they do freeze lots of tropical fruit coming into the US), but you better have a biiiig greenhouse or live in a tropical climate if you want to actually grow them. They evidently do not strike from cuttings and take a very long time to begin bearing, so a good mangosteen grove is a true treasure.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 4, 2011 9:02:39 GMT -5
Mangosteen - I've germinated them before without much trouble (but yeah, pre-frozen ones won't grow, and they do freeze lots of tropical fruit coming into the US), but you better have a biiiig greenhouse or live in a tropical climate if you want to actually grow them. They evidently do not strike from cuttings and take a very long time to begin bearing, so a good mangosteen grove is a true treasure. Actually, as I said before what astonishes me is how little of the fruit getting into Manhattan's Ctown is frozen (i.e. how much when I stick the pits in a pot, actually grow). As I write this I'm looking across the room at a pot containing two fairly sizable jackfruit saplings both of which came from pits out of a chunk of fruit I bought last autumn. Next to it is a somewaht larger pot filled with tiny seedlings of wampee (a odd tropical fruit realted to the citrus family) Lichees are dammed easy to grow (but then again a lot of those around here come from florida and california so they wouln't be frozen anyway) I've grown rambutan a few times as well. A lot of the other fruits I see would likey germinate (the mangoes, the papayas, the guavas, etc) but since I don't like the fruit to begin with, I don't really bother (I didn't really like the wampee either, but I had already bought it, and belive in getting maximum use from my money)
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