How To Make Playdough At Home

Right, now I'm going to show you how to make playdough at home and we've got some simple, easy, home-found ingredients. We're going to be using some plain flour in this bowl here. We're going with 2 cups of this.

This is the cup I used. It doesn't matter how much or how big your cup is, obviously, because you will then use 1 cup of just table salt, so 2 parts of flour and 1 part salt. Now, to improve the consistency of this, we're going to be adding some cream of tartar, probably something you will never have used before but it is very easy to find in your supermarket and we're also going to be using some vegetable oil.

It can be any form of oil, really. Again, it's just to help to make it a little bit more elastic, a bit more doughy. Okay, so what we need to do is we're going to add our flour to a saucepan, all that in there, then we get our salt, put that in there, then we're going to use 1 tablespoon of the cream of tartar.

Here we go, we put that in and we're going to be using 2 tablespoons of the vegetable oil. Now, to mix this all together, we're going to need some warm water and we're going to use 2 cups of the warm water. So as I said, really, it doesn't matter as long as you get all the proportions correct – 2 of water, 2 of flour, 1 of salt, 1 tablespoon of tartar and 2 of vegetable oil.

That will all work out nicely. So we'll just give this a good mix now. Don't worry too much about any of the lumps that you're inevitably going to get and once we've got this fairly mixed in, we're going to apply it to a low heat until we get to the right consistency.

You'll start to see that the consistency has really changed. It's gone from that thin liquid into something like this and really very doughy. You can see it's all in one lump.

There's none sticking into the sides and at this point, you're done with your cooking. So, all we're going to do is we're just going to put my bowl over here. We just need to do any last minute mixing and then we need to wait for that to cool.

Right, so we've allowed our playdough to cool down. It didn't take very long, 10 or 15 minutes, really maximum, and as you can see here, we've got a lovely big solid lump. Now, because we've added the cream of tartar and the vegetable oil, it gives you this really good stretchy consistency and it's really holding together quite nicely.

I don't need to put any flour on here. This, very strangely, because of the tartar, it's got a little acid in it and the vegetable oil, you'll find especially if you're a teacher or something like that, you'll find this is conductive. If you attach a light here and you put a battery in here, this will in fact conduct the electricity and you don't need to turn on the lights.

It means you make bendy circuits, anything like that. So here we are, here is our playdough. We'll make a nice little man quickly, just to show you how nice and solid it is.

Here we are, for the head, and then for sort of little arms, there we go, and that is how to make playdough at home. .