How to Make Playdough

Shop-bought playdough costs a few pounds a tub and dries out the moment a lid goes back on crooked. This version is flour, salt and water, it takes about five minutes, and you almost certainly have everything already.

Jennifer from Sea Lemon makes hers with a salt dough recipe, which is the no-cook route. There is no pan, no stove and nothing hot, so children can do the whole thing themselves apart from the measuring.

The trade-off against the shop version is shelf life. Homemade playdough lasts about four weeks in the fridge rather than months in a tub, and it is worth knowing that going in.

The Playdough Recipe

One cup of flour, half a cup of salt, half a cup of water. That makes roughly the volume of two shop tubs.

• Flour: plain all-purpose. Nothing else needed.
• Salt: ordinary table salt. It is not seasoning, it is a preservative and it is what gives the dough its slightly grainy, squeezable body.
• Water: room temperature, added gradually rather than all at once.

Add the water slowly. The flour-to-water ratio shifts depending on how humid your kitchen is and how packed the flour was in the cup, so the last splash should go in a little at a time while you watch what the dough does.

No-Cook Playdough or Cooked?

This is the no-cook version and it is the right one for a rainy afternoon with children.

The cooked version adds cream of tartar and a spoon of oil, then goes in a pan over low heat until it pulls into a ball. It comes out smoother, stretchier and much closer to the shop texture, and it keeps for a couple of months rather than a few weeks.

What you give up is the hands-off part. Cooked dough needs an adult at the hob and a few minutes of stirring, and it has to cool before anyone can touch it. If the point of the afternoon is that the children make it themselves, stay with no-cook.

Colouring It

Divide the plain dough into as many balls as you want colours before you add anything.

Press a deep well into the middle of each ball and drop the colour into that well. Five to ten drops of food colouring gives a strong colour. Folding the dough over the well before you start kneading keeps most of it off your hands.

Food colouring stains. That is the one thing worth knowing before you hand this to a small child. It comes off skin in a day or so, but it comes off worktops and clothes considerably less willingly. Washable kids' paint colours just as well and rinses straight off, which makes it the better choice for anyone under about six.

You can also colour the whole batch in the bowl while you mix, which is less messy but only gets you one colour.

Wash your hands between colours. Skip that and every ball after the first comes out a muddy version of itself.

Fixing Sticky or Crumbly Dough

Sticking to your hands: too much water. Add flour a tablespoon at a time and keep kneading. It takes less than you think.

Crumbling apart: too dry. Wet your hands rather than pouring more water in, and keep kneading. Wet hands add water in tiny increments, which is exactly what a dry dough needs.

Grainy and rough: the salt has not dissolved. Knead it longer, or use warm water next time.

Still sticky after plenty of flour: the batch is too wet to rescue cleanly. Add another half cup of flour and a pinch of salt and treat it as a bigger batch.

How Long It Keeps

Four weeks or so, in a sealed bag or airtight tub in the fridge. On the counter it dries at the edges within a day or two.

Let it come back to room temperature before anyone plays with it. Straight from the fridge it is stiff and cold and children lose interest fast.

Dough that has gone hard at the edges usually comes back with a few drops of water kneaded through. Dough with any fuzz on it goes in the bin.

Making the Shapes Permanent

This is salt dough, so anything made from it can be baked hard and kept.

Bake at a low temperature, around 250 degrees Fahrenheit, for two hours or so depending on thickness, turning halfway. Low and slow is the whole trick. A hot oven puffs the surface and cracks it.

Once cool and hard the shapes take paint well, and a coat of sealant on both sides stops them softening later. Our salt dough ornaments guide covers the baking and sealing in full.

A Note on Safety

Playdough of any kind is not food, and this one is worth watching a little more closely than most because half a cup of salt is a genuinely large amount.

A lick will not hurt anyone. A mouthful is a different matter, and salt dough is a real hazard to dogs, who will eat it happily and can get seriously ill. Keep it off the floor and out of reach when nobody is playing with it.

For toddlers who still put everything in their mouths, an oobleck tray is the safer sensory option - cornflour and water, nothing else.

For a colder-feeling batch on the same shelf of pantry ingredients, try how to make fake snow.