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There are many reasons you might want to steer clear of red food dye for coloring the next time you make a red velvet cake. Maybe you’re allergic to it, maybe you’d rather not use dyes, maybe you ran out and your cake batter is more pink than red, or maybe you had an accidental spill that made your kitchen look somewhat unsettling. Whatever the case, there are alternatives to red food coloring that don’t require placing an Amazon special order for beet powder. Indeed, you might have a bottle of a terrific crimson colorant already kicking around your kitchen: Red wine.

Cookbook author Stella Parksuses 1 ½ cups of dry red wine in her red velvet cake. The color will be pale when the batter is raw, but it will develop into a deep burgundy in the oven. This method won’t yield bright, stop-sign-red cake layers, but they will be reddish.

The “dry” part of dry red wine is quite important. Dry means that there is little to no residual sugar in the wine; it all got fermented out. If you have an off-dry, semi-dry, or sweet red, it can become difficult to adjust for the additional sugar in the recipe. Parks uses a cabernet sauvignon: Full-bodied, fruity, and deep red. Zinfandel or a deep pinot noir can be used, but maybe avoid the grassy notes of a cabernet franc.

Red wine, just like several other ‘red’ colored food such as red grapes, berries, beets, red cabbage, among others, contains anthocyanins. These compounds, which give the plants their red or purple hue, are also present in cocoa powder. Particularly, it is the raw, natural cocoa powder that contains anthocyanins. The Dutch-processed cocoa, however, undergoes an alkalizing process that changes its color from brick red to dark brown due to neutralization.

The anthocyanins are sensitive to pH. Hence, when lemon juice is added to red cabbage, it changes its color to a super-bright, vibrant pink. Similarly, when an acid is added to the anthocyanins in cocoa powder, it causes a color change. In many recipes for red velvet cake, buttermilk, which is already acidic, is used. Also, white distilled vinegar is used to increase the acidity, causing the anthocyanins in the natural cocoa powder to react and turn the cake redder when baked. Wine, which is acidic and contains its own anthocyanins, is also used in Stella Parks’s red velvet cake recipe instead of the acidified buttermilk, giving the raw cocoa a redder color.

Various posters and bakers on social media who have made the cake claim that the resulting cake is a brighter-colored chocolate cake that can be perceived as red with either a keen eye or a decent amount of imagination. There are instances where the cake appears to be burgundy, provided one looks at it under the right light and with a little stretch of imagination, according to a baker on X, formerly known as Twitter. Initially, it might appear similar to a brown chocolate cake, but once cut, the difference in the interior color becomes noticeable.

A baker on Reddit shared that although the final color wasn’t extremely red, it was redder than a usual chocolate cake. Someone inquired if one could identify it as a red velvet cake with eyes closed, to which the responses varied. However, a user chimed in to add that the red wine red velvet cake, despite its color, has a distinct taste, which sets it apart from a regular devil’s food cake. The bitterness of the raw cocoa coupled with the tanginess of the wine in the batter gives it the characteristic red velvet taste. Irrespective of the color, the baker said that a red velvet cake made with red wine was ‘absolutely the best cake they’ve ever made.’

Read the original article on Daily Meal.