Bunga Telang: The Blue Dye

Bunga telang (*Clitoria ternatea*, butterfly pea flower) is a flowering vine indigenous to Southeast Asia and documented in Malay and Javanese traditional medicine as a memory-enhancing and stress-reducing herb. Its culinary significance, however, derives almost entirely from a single property: the most vivid natural blue-to-purple food colouring available without synthetic dye. The intense blue of fresh butterfly pea flowers (from anthocyanin pigments, specifically delphinidin-3,5-glucoside) is pH-sensitive — blue in neutral or alkaline conditions, shifting to purple and pink at acidic pH. This colour-shifting property produces applications in cooking that are both visually spectacular and conceptually interesting: a blue rice (nasi kerabu in Malaysian Kelantanese tradition), a blue cake, a cocktail that turns purple on addition of lemon juice.

Bunga Telang — Clitoria ternatea, Butterfly Pea Flower

• Saffron (natural colouring as primary function, flavour secondary — though saffron's flavour is more assertive), beet as natural red colouring, black sesame as natural colouring, Japanese matcha (gree