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You'll Never Guess How These Smoothie Bowls Get Their Blue Hue

If you’ve ever perused Instagram for smoothie bowls, you may have noticed a new trend in this beautiful and healthy mania: blue.
Feasting on Fruit

If you’ve ever perused Instagram for smoothie bowls, you may have noticed a new trend in this beautiful and healthy mania: blue. Not the usual pink of berry-filled smoothies, or the purple hue of blueberries. No, not even green (thanks to the addition of spirulina), but BLUE smoothie bowls.

Blue smoothie.
Feasting on Fruit
Blue smoothie.

Blue is not a color we often eat ― as candy, maybe, but definitely not when it’s supposed to be good for us. What does that mean for smoothie bowls? Are they getting pumped with chemical food coloring just so they look colorful?

We looked into this phenomena and are happy to report that blue smoothies are 100 percent natural ― made with homemade food dye ―and still totally good for us. They are, however, made with red cabbage. The color comes from a homemade dye cooked down from red cabbages.

To make this all-natural dye, a head of chopped cabbage is boiled for roughly 20 minutes. The cabbage is discarded, and the reserved liquid is cooked down for another hour. The resulting thick liquid is mixed with baking soda (in increments of 1/8 teaspoon at a time) until it turns into a brilliant shade of blue. Then the natural dye is used to turn our food into a beautiful shade of blue.

We found a tutorial on how to make your own blue food coloring from food blogger Feasting on Fruit. Watch below if you feel inclined to delve into the blue smoothie bowl trend.

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