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Find out how to make beetroot powder for your homemade cosmetics, food colorings, or as a healthy supplement to your diet.
Beetroot powder has been gaining popularity in the last years for a number of reasons.
Many people use it as a supplement to help lower blood pressure, or to boost energy and help detox. Others use it to naturally sweeten while receiving the benefits of its added nutrients. In the natural communities, though, it has become popular due to its beautiful color.
Not only can you use it as a natural food coloring, but you can also grind it into a really fine powder that can be used in homemade natural cosmetics.
A couple of years ago I wanted to do just that. I was looking to make some natural blush with beetroot powder, but couldn’t find any at any local stores. Desperate to try it out, I ordered a bunch of it in bulk online because the shipping costs were higher than the actual product and I figured that if it worked as well as I thought it would, I would eventually use it all up.
Unfortunately things didn’t go as well as I had planned.
First of all the beetroot powder that I bought wasn’t ground very finely, and it didn’t stick to my face when trying to use it as a blush. When trying to use it in lipglosses and the like, it only made a gritty mess!
I gave upon the idea for a while and hid it all away in my cabinet for a couple of months.
Fast forward a few months, I decided that I wanted to try to dye fabric with it. (Don’t expect to get beautifully dyed fuchsia fabric if you try it, but that’s a story for another day.) I went to my cabinet, and was disappointed when I saw that my pretty fuchsia beetroot powder had turned an ugly shade of brown!
I decided that, after having made several types of flour from fruits like carob and coconut, that I could use the same procedure for making my own beetroot powder. No more spending exhorbitant shipping costs or having to buy in bulk. It’s easy to make just the amount you need, when you need it, and have fresh beetroot powder available for your projects and recipes.
It also has several other advantages. You can choose which beets you want to use, whether it be organic or fresh from your own garden, so you know exactly what you are using. You can also dehydrate beetroot chips, which tend to stay bright pink for longer, and wait to grind the up until you need them. I find that when exposed to the air, beetroot powder eventually turns brown, especially if there is any humidity where you have stored it. When well sealed, it will last longer, but if you only grind up as much as you’ll need for several weeks at a time,you can ensure that you’re always using fresh powder.
How to make Beetroot Powder
How to Make Beetroot Powder
Ingredients
- 1 beet
Instructions
- Wash and peel fresh beet roots and slice thinly. You can use a food processor to thinly and evenly slice the beetroot quickly.
- Dry the slices in a food dehydrator, a convection oven on low heat, or in the sun covered with a net to keep insects from touching them.
- You can now eat or store your homemade beetroot chips. 🙂
- When you want to make fresh beetroot powder, take a few dried beetroot chips and grind them up finely in a powerful food processor, or in a coffe grinder like I do.
- If you are having a hard time getting the powder fine enough for your use, like when you want to use your beetroot powder as a powdered blush, I’ve found that the best way is to grind with a coffee grinder until the powder starts to accumulate on the cover of the grinder. The powder that builds up on the cover should be very fine and perfect for cosmetic uses. You can easily remove it with a paintbrush.
- Store the beetroot powder in an airtight container if possible to keep it fresher for longer.
Paleo linguini with Clam Sauce
Stephen
Hi, I’ve been drinking two small juiced beets a day for the last couple of years, but I’ve got to travel extensively for the next few months. How much Beet powder do you think equals the juice from two beets of about 150g each?
Tracy Ariza
Hi Stephen,
Sorry for the delay. I couldn’t find the notes I’d taken on how much powder I obtained from my beets.
Here’s what I wrote down in one of my experiments with making beetroot powder:
513grams of fresh beetroot (3 small beetroots that were 451g once peeled) ended up drying into 72g of dried beetroot. So, you’d probably want to take just under 50g of the powder to get around the same amount.
Martha Machaku salakana
Thank you very clear procedure I love that though I’m in agribusiness Tanzania
My brand in food product is martplus eatsmart Tanzania
Tracy Ariza
Hi Martha,
You’re very welcome! Good luck with your business! 🙂
Melissa
Great I loved the simple explanation,. Option you can use and what to expect theb4 and after ,pic you provided,. I love you gave me a time line to follow b4 the product will change colour ,. And all the uses, you provided for the one product,. Great job,. N thank u for the easy follow guide. I really need beets in my diet, n powder drinks will help.
Tracy Ariza
Hi Melissa,
I’m happy to have helped you.
In the end, my homemade beetroot powder didn’t really change color for a very long time (if at all), so I was surprised by that. Perhaps the way it gets stored could affect that. I’ve also found that different beets give different colored powders. I was lucky with the first batch of these photos as they gave a beautiful bright fuchsia powder. Sometimes I end up making a more subdued, mauve colored powder. It all depends on the beets you begin with.
Gaye
Hi, thanks for that. I am trying to convert dried herbal roots to powder so I can encapsulate. If I have 100g of root/bits and grind finely do you think it will make 100g powder? This may sound daft but I don’t know if weight alters when the composition alters.
Tracy Ariza
Hi Gaye,
No worries! Yes, you should still end up with the same weight. You may lose the slightest amount because some of the powder can get left behind in your grinder or whatever you use to make the beetroot powder, but you’ll still have the same weight as long as you are beginning with 100g of already dried roots. If you are starting with fresh roots, of course, you’ll end up with quite a bit less weight of powder once the water evaporates.
What will change instead is the volume- the powder usually takes up a lot less room because you don’t have the same amount of air space between pieces.
I hope that helps!
Melissa
I would to weigh then. Dry 3 large beets, get a small measuring cut weigh the final result , mark it on ur scoop. So u know how much ur making per drink. That will determine the difference.
Leah
Will this work with golden beets? Not sure if the color is intense enough, but I am Interested in trying it.
Tracy Ariza
Hi Leah,
You can definitely make a beet powder with them, but I’m not sure what you’d end up with if you are using it as a food coloring. I’ve never seen golden beets in my area, so I’ve never tried it. I’d love to hear how it goes if you give it a shot! 😉
Eric
Hey Leah, Yes this can be done with golden beets. Its makes a vibrant yellow color, almost with metallic hues. I buy my powder from http://www.spicedforyou.com. They use a cold process to preserve the color changes from heat, which makes it dull and dried out.
Tracy Ariza
Thanks, Eric!
Azra
Tell me how dear..?
Marisol
Excuse me but how long will it take for the beet chips to dry?
I have a school project, and i need the beet powder but want to make it myself.
The problem is that we have 6 weeks until it is due and i’m not sure how long it will take for the chips to dry.
Tracy Ariza
Hi Marisol,
You’ll want to dry the slices in either a food dehydrator or in low heat in the oven.
It will take several hours, which is completely dependent upon how thinly you slice the beetroot, the humidity of your environment, the method you use, etc.
Set aside an afternoon for the drying part. Luckily, you don’t need to really do anything while it dries except for checking on it occasionally to see if they are brittle yet or not.
shimel
hello
how long does it usually take for the that pink powder to turn into brown? is there anyway to stop that?
Tracy Ariza
Hi Shimel,
Actually, I’ve found that my homemade batches aren’t turning brown in color. I even used the beetroot powder to color coconut flakes (You can see the result in my post about making paleo sprinkles), and found that the color stayed pretty after many months- even more than a year. The color did fade somewhat, but stayed pink.
I think maybe the important thing is to make sure the beets are completely dry and that you keep the humidity away from your homemade powder.
I am finding that the color of the powder depends a lot on the beets used. Some beets give me the color you see in the pictures. Other beets give more of a mauve color instead.
Hannah
I used your instructions to make a beautiful color of frosting for my daughters birthday cake. I really wanted to add color, but I try not to use artificial food coloring. The first recipe I tried called for cooking the beets and pureeing them in some of the juice to get a food coloring. That attempt resulted in a weird orange pink color so I kept searching online and found your article. Now I can have beautiful color on her cake and I don’t have to feel guilty!
Tracy Ariza
Yay, Hannah!
I’m so happy it worked out for you!
Yes, I’ve found that most recipes for natural food colorings ask you to cook things before getting the coloring, but that not only diminishes their power, but it also tends to make the colors a lot murkier! (You can waste lots of Spinach trying to get green, but you don’t need much if you use it raw.) I have a post showing some of my other natural food colorings that may help you with other colors too. Beets, though, are the best for sweets because they really add only another sweetness, and don’t give any off flavoring. 🙂
I hope she had a very happy birthday! And thanks for letting me know that it went well!
Liz
I’m having great trouble in getting my dried beetroot to grind in my coffee grinder, I popped it into my food processor to try to get it smaller to put into the grinder but its scratched all the bowl & still hasn’t got smaller. Now my coffee grinder is over heating & just not getting anywhere. I cooked my beet first, do you think it makes a difference if you don’t, it’s certainly not like yours at all.
Thanks
Tracy Ariza
Hi Liz,
I’m sorry to hear that.
When my coffee grinder isn’t handling something, I try my blender first. My food processor doesn’t work for hard, small things like this. So, that’s one thing you could try. If your blender isn’t getting it fine enough, you can then move it to the coffee grinder to get a finer powder.
As for the cooking of the beets…
Honestly, I’ve never tried it. I’d think it would alter the consistency, and you’d lose the potency of the color. I see no reason for cooking them first, so I probably won’t ever try it to know for sure. Is there a reason you chose to cook the beet first?
Alka
Hi and heartiest thanx and blessings to you for this awesome post – and to those who’ve commented/asked questions as all of this was excitingly informative?
I followed your guidance given here (without having realized there were comments/questions/replies following it) and wished to share my experience here.
I grated the beetroots and dehydrated them using a conventional oven. This is my first attempt in making a tinted lipbalm and the first step was preparing the color.
The color of the powder from my processing is rather mauvish-pinkish and not bright pink which may suggest that the powder’s color may depend on the beetroot and not the size of the slices (?).
How do you use this powder as a blush? I experienced it didn’t “stick” to my hand/skin…
Thanking you once again❣️
Alka
Tracy Ariza
Hi Alka,
That’s really interesting. I thank you for sharing your experience. It gets us one step closer to figuring out why sometimes the beetroot powder is much brighter pink than other times. I’m wondering if the oven heat may also affect the color. My thought with the thicker slices was that it needed more time in the food dehydrator, meaning that the outer parts of the beetroot had dried first, but needed to remain “cooking” in the dehydrator for longer- which ends up browning it slightly. When mixed together, the browner powder mixed with the pinker inside powder becomes a more muted mauve. This, of course, is just a hypothesis on my part, and I really need to give it another try. I have some beets growing in my garden, and I really could start to harvest some and experiment some more. (I actually still have some beetroot powder from the batch in the pictures, and it is still just as bright as it was back then- which really amazes me considering every time I’ve bought beetroot powder it has browned on me almost immediately.)
If I figure it out, I’ll update the post with new information.
Beetroot powder on its own doesn’t stick well to the skin, but there are ways to help it. First, the powder has to be ultra fine. When grinding it in a coffee grinder, I only use the super fine powdery powder that sticks to the lid of the coffee grinder. I work in batches and use a clean, dry paintbrush to brush the powder into a separate container.
Once you have your fine powder, you can mix it with other ingredients to help get it to stick. It can be lightened in color with arrowroot powder, for example. Magnesium stearate is often added to blush and powder recipes to get them to stick better too. Some people claim that a few drops of essential oils added to the mix will help, too, but I haven’t tried that.
I used to make my own blush all of the time. I’ll have to get back into it and get a couple of recipes up on the blog. 😉
Azra
I really want to know about this darling