Kokkina Avga (Red Easter Eggs)

Thanks to Wendy’s its all Greek to me for passing along this thrifty tip on how she took onion skins, and made beautiful eggs out of them…. Yes I know Easter is over but I found this rather fun and wanted to pass it along. If you would like to be a featured guest post on Look What I Made , watch for our weekly post each Tuesday called A Thrifty online craft fair, link up and you may be selected for our weekly feature post.

Kokkina Avga (Red Easter Eggs)

I posted about the red Easter eggs awhile back. They are the coolest things! This will probably be my go to project when the kids need something for school when they talk about living in Greece.

The recipe says to use yellow (Spanish) onions. Neither the store or farm market had what I consider yellow/Spanish onions. (I prefer red onions so I haven’t paid attention to whether they have ever had yellow onions.) That’s one of the joys of a foreign recipe–you can never be quite sure that the writer means what you think they mean. It did occur to me that I could ask if they were the right onions but that would have taken all the mystery out of this adventure. I got the closest thing I could find. I consider these red onions but they have skins like yellow onions.

Make the dye. In a stainless saucepan, place skins of 15 yellow (Spanish) onions and 2 tablespoons of white vinegar in 4 1/2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer covered for 30 minutes. [Yep, onion skins and vinegar boiling is kind of, um, pungent.]

Strain dye into a glass bowl, and let cool to room temperature. In a stainless saucepan add the cooled strained dye and eggs (up to 1 dozen) at room temperature. The eggs should be in one layer and covered by the dye.

Bring to a boil over medium heat. When boiling, reduce heat to low, cover and simmer. The directions I have say that dyeing time will be affected by the color of the eggs but I used both brown and white eggs and there wasn’t a lot of difference. Start checking for color at 12-15 minutes. Do not simmer longer than 20 minutes. If eggs are not a red enough color after 20 minutes, leave in the pot and remove from heat. When the pot as cooled enough, place in refrigerator and let sit until desired color is reached. When eggs are the right color, remove eggs with a slotted spoon and cool on racks. When they can be handled, coat lightly with olive (or other edible) oil and polish with paper toweling. Refrigerate until time to use.

My egg is on the left the one I bought at the laiki (farm market) is on the right. Mine is more brownish/burgandy then the true red of the laiki egg. Another blogger had the same problem and speculated that it was because she used red onion skins instead of yellow. I also suspect that the one from the laiki was dyed with commercial dyes. Stay tuned…I will be looking for real yellow oniions before next Easter.

Kokkina Avga (Red Easter Eggs)

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