I am planning to make Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) for a friend's party. Because she is vegatarian I'd like to make one set of vegetable dumplings and one set of conventional dumplings. To make it easy to tell these apart I'd like to color the dough for one of them.
Can you suggest me a simple way to color the dough of the dumplings? The dough for Jiaozi is simply made from water and flour. I am mostly interested in ways to color the dough that use "natural" integredients as she does not really like artificial stuff. Also, what is the traditional Chinese way to color dough?
Best Answer
You could add chopped fresh herbs to the dough. I'm not familiar with Jiaozi to know how much it would affect the texture, but its common in pasta dough. If you chop it fine enough, it should bleed quite a bit of green color into the dough.
I don't know any particularly traditional food coloring methods, but I do know that tea is often used in place of water to change the color and taste of certain dishes (e.g. tea eggs). However, I doubt that is a flavor you really want to introduce into the dumpling dough.