Easy Homemade Playdough Recipe
What you’ll need:
1 cup flour
1 cup water
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1/3 cup salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
food coloring
This recipe makes a large amount, probably equal to 2-3 containers from the store. So you might want to halve it or make it in 2 saucepans. I made 6 batches of the full recipe because with 3 kids wanting to play with it, it’s good to have more to go around. More to go around = less fighting.
In a 2 quart saucepan, add 1 cup of flour, 2 teaspoons of cream of tarter, and 1/3 cup of salt. Yup, that’s 1/3 cup of salt. Don’t make my mistake and misread it to mean teaspoon. I could blame my toddler because he was hanging on my leg. Yeah that’s it. That resulted in a stickier ball of playdough. The salt keeps it from sticking and also helps preserve it, so you definitely want that in there. If you make more than one batch, feel free to play around with the amount though. The original recipe called for 1/2 cup and that made it a little too much of a salty texture for what we wanted so I decreased it to 1/3 cup and that worked much better.
Add 1 cup of water and 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil. You could probably use canola oil if you don’t have vegetable oil, but as I haven’t tried it, I can’t make any promises.
Turn your burner on medium/low and stir. It will be a little lumpy. That’s okay.
Keep stirring until it starts getting a little solid. If there are still a few lumps, that’s ok – you can work them out later. If your stove is already hot, this may only take 20-30 seconds, but it may take 2-3 minutes if it’s still heating up.
Once it reaches that point, add the food coloring right away. It will be much easier to mix up if you do it now. I showed the regular food coloring you can get from the grocery store in the ingredients picture (because it’s easier to identify) but I used my favorite AmeriColor Soft Gel Paste Food Color – this food coloring is amazing – a little goes a long way and you get such rich colors easily. I rave about this every chance I get.
Stir in your food coloring – my kids wanted orange here, not that can you exactly tell the color from the picture below:
Now the dough will start getting thicker and a little lumpy. Just keep stirring.
Once the dough starts gathering together around the spoon you know it’s done. This may be 20 seconds or 2 minutes from the time you put the food coloring in, again depending on how hot your stove is. My first batch was longer, but once I whipped together more batches, it literally only took a few seconds and a total of 2 minutes on the stove from start to finish
Once it’s cooled, I like to knead the playdough for a minute or two to get out any lumps and to get it to a better consistency. Then again it could just be my excuse to squish it myself before handing it over to the kids…but I’m not admitting anything…
