Do you know what colors make black food coloring? this is one of the questions our readers ask a lot. Well, we´ve got you covered. Primary colors are always evolving, whether one wants to make an argument in favor of three or five. Because white is a reflection of all light and black is the absorption of all light, what colors make black food coloring? To get black food coloring—and the same holds true for paint and any other physical mixture—you have to combine three primary colors. Those colors are red, green, and yellow. If you mix all three in an exact, 1:1:1 ratio, you will get black. Of course, everyone calls black a color and by the definition of societal acceptance, it is essentially a color. However, black is actually all colors completely absorbed, reflecting no colors back at your eyes. However, it’s a little more complicated than that. Scientifically speaking, black is an effect of the absence of light reflected back to your eyes. It’s different with pigments, which is what food coloring really is. What you perceive is black, is not really true black at all, but our best approximation of it.
How To Make Black Food Coloring
Micah Leal is a chef and recipe developer with more than 5 years of professional experience in restaurants and bakeries such as Husk Restaurant and Harken Cafe & Bakery in Charleston, South Carolina. Micah Leal is an enthusiastic chef with a special interest in the food science and culinary histories that shape the recipes people make today. His reputation for making recipes accessible and thoughtfully teaching difficult kitchen techniques is informed by his experience as a pastry chef as well as his background as a high school teacher. He has also developed nearly 200 recipes for southernliving.com and Southern Living Magazine.
Updated on August 31, 2023
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Sure, making cakes and cookies with the little ones is fun, but there’s an upside to decorating without them: better-looking confections without the neon colors and sprinkles. Black icings and fondants can add a touch of sophistication to cookies and cakes on a birthday, on New Year’s Eve, or at a wedding—or add a spooky element on Halloween. From black-and-white cookies to an elegant tiered cake with black fondant and elegant gold leaf, these desserts add a level of prestige and artistry to any special occasion.
Instead of buying from the grocery store, make your own black icing that you can delicately pipe into different textures on your desserts. There are a few methods to making your own black food coloring, depending on whether you’re starting with store-bought food coloring or making it with other materials from your pantry.
What You Need To Make Black Food Coloring
If you have time, consider buying black food coloring online. It is the most efficient way to lend true black to buttercream, icing, or fondant. If you want to use what you already have in the pantry, making black food coloring requires blue, green, and red food dyes. Buttercream icing and fondant are initially white, and using food coloring to change all that to a true black takes a lot of dye.
It’s also important to use food coloring gel or paste and not the food coloring liquid. The gel and paste are more concentrated in color and less likely to alter the consistency of your frosting or fondant than the liquid food coloring.
If you don’t like to use processed food dyes, there are natural ingredients you can use for food coloring instead. There are pros and cons to each, which we’ll discuss below.
How To Make Black Food Coloring With Gel
What You’ll Need
- Blue gel food coloring
- Green gel food coloring
- Red gel food coloring
- Small bowl and white plate
- White icing or frosting
You can use store-bought gel food colors to make black if you have some on hand. The more dye you use, the closer you can get to achieving coal black results. Follow these steps to mix gel food colors into black dye:
- Mix one part of blue food coloring with two and a half parts of green food coloring and three parts of red food coloring in a small bowl. (This recipe is a good base formula that should create a color close to black, but the exact color will depend on the brand and type of food coloring used).
- Smear a little bit of the gel on a white plate to assess the color.
- Adjust your mixture if needed. For example, if your dye has a greenish hue, add more red. If it looks purple, add more green.
- Once you’re satisfied, mix the black coloring into a bowl of white icing or frosting. If you still notice one color coming through, add more of the other colors to balance. If the color is a murky grey, you will need to mix more black dye to add to your icing.
What Is Black?
This may seem like a silly question to some of you, but I think it is important to start with.
You may have noticed that black is absent from the color wheel. That is because it does not actually have a place on the visible color spectrum.
But does that mean that black is not a color itself? The answer depends on how you define color.
If we are talking from a purely scientific standpoint, then black and also white are outcasts and are not true colors. Black is what we see when very little light is reflected off an object. White is what we see when all wavelengths of light are reflected off an object. So in a sense, black is not a color by itself but rather the absence of color.
But as artists we use black as a physical color just like red, green, blue and so on. That is because we are also interested in the perception of color. Our definition of color is not limited to the colors on the visual spectrum, but also all the different ways we are able to perceive color and light. I wrote about this more in this post.
Do You Need Black on Your Palette?
Black can be an incredibly useful color on your palette, but it is far from a necessary color as you can mix your own (I will discuss how in the sections below).
Whether or not you have black on your palette also depends on what kind of subjects you like to paint. If you paint mostly inside still lifes and portraits, then black may be much more useful than if you mostly paint outside like the impressionists.
For inside subjects, the darks are much deeper than the darks outside.
Personally, I do not use black on my palette as I prefer to mix it myself. That is what suits me and I may even change this in the future. But you might find it easier to paint with black on your palette.
When John Singer Sargent and Claude Monet painted together, Sargent questioned “where’s the black?” in reference to Monet’s palette. Sargent struggled to comprehend how one could paint without black on the palette. But Monet was true to the impressionist theory and made use of blues, greens and earth tones as more colorful alternatives to black. Two masters, two different opinions on black. So there is no right or wrong answer here.
Mixing Your Own Black
The downside of mixing your own black is that you will not be able to reach that deep black which you can get straight from the tube. But we can get pretty close with our own mixtures.
I mix my own black by combining raw umber with ultramarine blue. It is not a deep black, but it is close enough, especially since I mostly paint landscapes. I think this is a very natural black which meshes well with the rest of the colors in my landscapes.
So why does raw umber and ultramarine blue result in a near black color? If you think about it, raw umber is really just a dark orange, and ultramarine blue is a dark blue. Orange and blue are complements, and when you mix two dark complements, then you get a dark gray (or near black).
This brings me to the other way you could mix your own black, and that is by mixing all three primary colors together (red, blue and yellow). This is essentially the same as mixing two complements together (mixing orange and blue is the same as mixing red, yellow and blue). However, I find that when you mix black by combining all three primary colors together that the addition of yellow makes it slightly lighter in value.
Also, the black you get from this will be pretty inconsistent as it depends on the types and proportions of primary colors you use. If you have more blue you will get a cool black and if you have more red you will get a warm black.
How To Make Black Food Coloring
- Dutch Cocoa Powder
- Charcoal Powder
- Naturally made, primary color mix
- Squid ink (yeah, we’re going there)
The reason we suggest Dutch Cocoa Powder, rather than just any cocoa powder, is because of how dark it is.
The object is to get black food coloring so you have to go with what works best and Dutch Cocoa Powder is the darkest.
Charcoal powder is another good option because it actually is black, rather than being just the darkest in a set of dark colors. If you’ve ever brushed your teeth with this stuff, it’s a testament to how well it can darken anything.
Squid Ink is another option—if you can get around the fact that you’re using it as a consumable—and it’s considered to be pretty healthy for you as an antimicrobial, antioxidant, cancer preventative, and immunity booster.
Not bad for a weird, underwater defense mechanism.
Naturally made primary colors are often quite easy to make. Usually, we would walk you through the various steps for making particular food coloring using vegetables.
However, black is a little different in that you have to make the primary colors first, then mix them.
How To Make Black Icing >> Check out the video below:
