Easily Add Eye-Popping Color To Your Homemade Pasta With Beets

Beets, otherwise known as beetroot, are earthy root vegetables packed with manganese, potassium, fiber, and vitamins. Delicious and nutritious, beets are also an excellent natural food colorant. You may be familiar with using beets in cakes for a natural red hue, but have you ever considered using them to develop eye-popping purple pasta?

Beetroot has an iconic purple, pink, and red color that can miraculously dye not only our food but also our bodies and clothes. This is due to colored pigments called betalains found in the vegetable. This incredible pigment makes it extremely easy to infuse our foods with mesmerizing color that endures through the cooking process. It's precisely why adding beets to pasta dough is such a great idea. It can amplify the visual appearance of a dish, as well as inject a little extra nutrition. It's easy enough to achieve a vibrant pasta shade with this one addition to your dough.

Mixing beetroot into your pasta dough is a little more complex than it appears. You want to prepare a beet purée and then leave it to cool before making the dough. Once you've poured your flour into a big bowl and set a well in the center, add the beet purée, eggs, and salt into the well. With these combined, you can bring in the flour from the sides of the bowl until you have a red sticky dough.

You can then knead the dough and add more flour or water until you have the desired dough consistency. Leave the dough to rest (resting fresh pasta dough is crucial), then you can roll out the pasta or use a machine to achieve your desired shape. Simple! 

A note on the beetroot purée: Recipes differ on whether you should use boiled or roasted beetroot to make the purée. There is debate over how these processes affect the nutritional value of our vegetables, and it's best to roast them if you want to reduce nutrient loss. Roasting also helps to keep some of that earthy flavor.

By following a similar process of adding puréed beets into your dough, you can unlock a diverse palette of shades and hues. For green strands, you'll commonly find spinach used. But you can also experiment with Swiss chard and nettles. For leafy greens like this, once they are wilted (or cooked), you want to transfer them quickly to an ice bath to keep the color as bright as possible. Then, squeeze out all the excess moisture before adding it to your dough. You can even wring the leafy greens in a clean towel to really dry them out.

If you want to go for a less conventional color, blue is also an option. You can add a blue hue to your pasta either with butterfly pea flowers or puréed red cabbage (although red cabbage water is a great food die too!). Be mindful that extracting the blue color from butterfly peas will require you to add more water to the pasta dough (instead of a purée), which may impact if you can use any eggs. As a result, you won't get that classic egg noodle flavor. The next time you make homemade pasta dough, consider adding a sparkle of color with a bit of puréed beets. You'll be pleasantly surprised by the vibrant burst of color and flavor it brings.