No, this isn’t about my hair. That will be another post.

Baking bread is super fun. I really love making all kinds. You know what’s even more fun?

Bread + food coloring.

Rising fun

There’s really nothing to it. Make dough as you normally would. Then mix in more drops of food coloring than you would expect at the final kneading step.

Then if it’s challah, braid away. The dough is just as easy and resilient as normal challah and even if with many drops of color you aren’t changing the overall water percentage very much.

Surface colors will get a lot darker during baking, as you would expect.

But what’s really cool is how bright the interiors can get.

Laminated, too

Laminated breads are a bit trickier and I still have a lot of learnings to go here. What I did was to make an extra really thin layer of colors.

And then I laminated that onto my dought and butter block, before the first letter fold and turn. I tried this technique because I’d seen some recipes using it for a chocolate croissant variant. As you can see, it didn’t really work, since you had the non-laminated dough which had no butter inside to go poof!

I’ll have to do these again and improve them. I think what I’ll try next is actually making multiple, small batches of colored dough, put them together and laminate that.

These croissants were from the Chef Steps recipe, the challah was was from Serious Eats.

They sure were pretty, though!