Goodness, with all the interest in home cooking these days, many people are trying out new schemes – vegetarian, vegan, plant based or such. Also, there is an interest in using only organic ingredients. If you read the instructions for red velvet cake, you use a good bit of red food coloring, red 40 is made from coal tar (as is imitation vanilla extract).
I don’t make red velvet cake but probably wouldn’t mind using food coloring, but there is an alternative. You can make red food coloring from guess what vegetable ---Beets! I found a recipe at Natural Beet Juice Red Dye—The Farm Girl Blog. You get a bunch of beets, peel them (I don’t know since the peels gave my dog beeturia) simmer in water for hours, eventually reducing the liquid and voila – natural red food coloring.
