The Grand Play-Dough Experiment: Salt Play-Dough

Most homemade play-dough recipes are variations on this most basic one.

Salt Play-Dough

Ingredients:
1 cup of salt
1 cup of water
2 cups of flour
1 tablespoon of cooking oil

Mix the salt, flour, oil, & water together.

My addition: it was too thin to just play with, it needed to be cooked over medium heat for 2-3 minutes (or until it comes together in a soft, but not sticky, ball).

Initial impressions:
-Very basic
-Didn't become smooth even after kneading for many minutes
-Leaves a light residue, but wipes up easily
-Easy to make
-Sticks to fingertips something awful (maybe it needed to be cooked a bit longer)


2 weeks later:

I'm going to guess that I put it in the bag before it was completely cooled, otherwise I have no idea why this dough turned into a puddle of goo! I know this isn't what this type of dough normally does... so strange.


~Regina

Other posts in the play-dough experiment series:
Kool-Aid Play-Dough
Traditional (Baking Soda) Play-Dough
Coffee Play-Dough
Gingerbread Play-Dough

The Grand Play-Dough Experiment: Gingerbread Play-Dough

Gingerbread Play dough

1 C. flour
½ C. salt
2 tsp. Cream of tartar
1 C. water
1 tsp. Vegetable oil
lots of cinnamon, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, whatever!

(This play dough is simply a slight variation of a standard salt dough.)

Mix the dry ingredients. Play with the spices until you get the scent and color you want. Mix water and oil together first and THEN add them to the dry ingredients and stir.

 In a pot, cook the mixture for two to three minutes, stirring frequently. The dough will start to pull away from the sides of the pan and clump together.

  Take the dough out of the pan and knead the dough until it becomes soft and smooth. Allow to cool and store in an air-tight container.

Initial impressions:
-Easy to make
-Good for having a little helper
-Feels like a standard salt dough
-Needs lots of kneading to feel smooth
-Smells amazing!
-Leaves your hands smelling great!
-Leaves a small amount of easily wiped residue.


2 weeks later:

-Firm and moist
-A rubbery, elastic feel when molded
-Only a very slight graininess from the salt
-Very smooth for a salt dough
-Still smells great
-Leaves a light residue on the play area and hands


~Regina

Other posts in the play-dough experiment series:
Kool-Aid Play-Dough
Traditional (Baking Soda) Play-Dough
Coffee Play-Dough

The Grand Play-Dough Experiment: Coffee Play-Dough

Coffee Play-Dough

1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup used coffee grounds
1/2 cup cool coffee (more or less depending on how wet/dry the grounds are)

Mix all ingredients thoroughly. Knead until an evenly combined ball. Store in a zip-lock bag after play.

My ingredients.

 Mixing the dries.

 Adding the coffee.

 Kneading and checking out the texture.

 Lots of residue!

Initial impressions:
-odd texture for play-dough (but I believe that's the point)
-doesn't have a particularly strong coffee smell (may depend upon the grounds)
-leaves a significant residue on the hands, but not on the play surface
-nice that it's an uncooked recipe (so you can include littles in making it)
-easy to make

Our little girl loved rolling it out.

 But wasn't thrilled about touching it.

 Cookie cutters didn't work very well.

 After a bit of storage and play:
-My daughter doesn't like the texture, so she had me touch it when she wanted to move it or something like that. She did enjoy rolling it out, though!
-Very, very wet after storage! We had to add a lot more flour to make it playable.
-Didn't do cookie cutters well.
-Left residue on hands and play area.

Final verdict: won't be making it again. Some kids and people might love the texture, but we certainly didn't. Plus, it was messy.

~Regina

Other posts in the Play-dough experiment series:
Kool-Aid Play-Dough
Traditional (Baking Soda) Play-Dough
Gingerbread Play-Dough

The Grand Play-Dough Experiment: Kool Aid Play-Dough

My daughter has recently discovered the wonders of play-dough. I like regular, store-bought play-dough, but there are so many fun recipes out there that I thought it would be a travesty to not try at least some of them. So, I give you my eventual series of posts (assuming I keep feeling well): the Grand Play-Dough Experiment!

I plan to make a different play-dough every couple of weeks, evaluate it a bit the first week, then eventually update the post to include how long it lasted and final impressions of that recipe. If I do not evaluate an aspect of play-dough that is important to you, please feel free to leave a comment asking for that info. I will be happy to update the post as long as the play-dough is still fresh enough to be worked with (or I happen to remember the details you desire).

This week we made Kool Aid Play-dough. I will add the recipe here because there are no guarantees that links will work forever.

Kool Aid Play-Dough

1 cup water
3 teaspoons of Cream of Tartar
1 cup of flour
1 package of Kool-Aid Mix (any flavor of unsweetened)
1 tablespoon of cooking oil
1/2 cup of salt


Mix dry ingredients in a large/medium pan. Add water and oil. Stir over medium heat until it looks like dough. Whatever the color of koolaid used should be the end result. This takes about 8 minutes. This recipe is 100% edible and can be eaten immediately.

 
We used a grape packet...

 Warming the water.

 Newly mixed dough.

 After kneading a bit (I ended up needing to knead it for quite a while to get it to a good, consistent texture).

Initial impressions:
-easy to make
-other flavors of kool aid would smell good, but I can't stand the grape smell
-nice, deep color
-color stays in the dough (only very slight staining on my fingers during initial kneading)
-grainy, but improves with kneading and playing
-leaves a residue on the hands and play surface (but easy to clean)
-nice and soft

After playing a while:
- I CANNOT stand the smell of the grape flavor
-still slightly grainy after playing with it several times this week
-storing well at room temperature

A note from a friend who loves kool aid play-dough: "the 'blue raspberry' and 'lemonade' (or lemonade blends) of kool-aid packets do NOT work well, way way too sticky."

After two weeks of play and storage:
-Very nice, smooth texture. All graininess is gone.
-Smell is still there.
-Color is beautiful.
-Still soft and moist. Doesn't dry out during play.

After almost a month this play-dough is still going strong (and still smells, too!).

After 6 months, this play-dough has not yet gone bad. However, it has become extremely sticky. I tried kneading it in some flour and it remained pretty sticky. I think it's time for us to say good-bye to this play-dough. I'm sure it could be saved but it probably isn't worth the effort.

Update on 7/18/12: I have made this recipe several times and it has become my favorite. Our daughter loves mixing all the dries together and then watching as it changes color when we add the water. It's definitely a great recipe!

~Regina

Other posts in the Grand Play-Dough Experiment Series:
Traditional (Baking Soda) Play-Dough
Coffee Play-Dough
Gingerbread Play-Dough

Bread dough variation: sub sandwich rolls

Every Sunday I made sub sandwich rolls for my husband to take for lunch during the week. It saves us money, makes his lunch more enjoyable, and makes me feel like I'm taking good care of him. :)  This dough is made exactly the same as my basic bread dough, it's just shaped differently.  Basically, I just wanted to give you another idea of what you could do with the dough--it's not complicated or anything like that.  So, if you haven't already, head over here to get the recipe and mixing instructions!

So, nothing new here, you've got your dough all mixed, kneaded, and ready to rise:

I like to put a bowl of boiling water into my warm oven with my rising dough--it helps keep the dough moist. This is especially helpful if I'm mixing up the dough and leaving it for a significant amount of time (like going to church or running to the grocery store).

Once the dough has doubled in size, I punch it down and divide it in half.

  Then I divide each half into three equal balls.

 Then I roll each ball of dough into a "snake" of dough (does anyone know the technical term for this?).  I make each "snake" of dough 8-9 inches long. I have found that when I leave the dough to rise, it expands more along the width than the length.

I also flour and then slash the top of each snake because I think it looks cool. I have no idea of this helps it in any way. (Note: you will notice that in some of these pictures I have 6 rolls and in others I have 4--I took pictures of the process two different weeks and used the best from each.)  Halfway through the slashing process:

Then I put the rolls back in the oven to rise and pull them out when they look something like this:

I warm my oven up to 400 degrees F and bake them for 8-10 minutes.  Just a note on the cookie sheet: I've begun using parchment paper (as you see in some of the previous pictures) rather than greasing my sheets and I loooove parchment paper so much more!

Let them cool on a wire rack and put them in a ziplock bag. These rolls keep for about a week, but they do dry out as the week goes along.

~Regina

Pizza Variation: Pizza Pockets

Let's face it: after a while the plain, old pizza pie gets kind of boring. So, I try to come up with ways to make pizza new and exciting to eat. I got the inspiration for this idea from Ourbestbites.com's Stuffed Pizza Rolls. I made the rolls and found them yummy, but very time-consuming, so I set out to figure out something faster and easier. This, my friends, is what I came up with.

 Pizza Pockets

If you do not have my pizza dough recipe and want it, it's over here.

Prep time: 1 hour 15 minutes (from beginning to mix the dough to putting the pockets in the oven)
Oven: 425 degrees F
Bake time: 8 minutes
Yield: approximately 4 dozen 2x3 pizza pockets

So...make a double recipe of pizza dough, whatever is your favorite dough, but I highly recommend my own, linked above. :) Let it rest and rise a bit and get your toppings prepared while you wait. Once it's rested about 10 minutes, pull it out and divide it in half (so you have two single-pizza crust dough lumps) and rolls one out on a well-floured surface.  And I mean well-floured because, well, you'll see...

A quick note on rolling dough out: I've found it easiest to press the dough out into the approximate shape I want it before rolling it thin. So with this dough, I pressed it into a small rectangle before going at it with my rolling pin. Obviously, the picture below does not show a rectangle--I didn't think of taking a picture of me pressing it out! This is just a lump of dough...

Roll it out and flour it on the top--we don't want this sticky at all!  This dough was rolled rather thinly, about between 1/4 and 1/8 of an inch. The sheet of dough was roughly 16x24 inches. I didn't measure it precisely--I'm not really into precision on these types of things--so just do whatever looks good to you (or whatever you have space for!).

Now, here's why you floured it so much: you need to be able to set aside the already rolled-out dough. If you have a nice kitchen with plenty of country space, you don't have to do this, but you do need to be able to move this piece of dough onto the top of the other piece of dough in the near future, and I've found it easiest to move large sheets of dough by rolling them up.

OK, so we set aside the first sheet of dough--on to the next one! Re-flour your surface and roll out your second lump of dough. You want to try to get it about the same dimensions as the first one. 

Now, take those toppings you got ready and place them on the dough in a kind of grid. I imagined that I would make my pizza pockets about 2.5x2.5 inches, so I tried to space my toppings accordingly.  You'll notice that I left the cheese out of a couple of the soon-to-be pockets--that's because my daughter and dairy don't exactly get along the greatest, but with the pizza pockets, it's easy to make some for just her.

I did just basic toppings: cheese and pepperoni. We aren't supreme pizza kind of people around here.

Now, take the sheet of dough that you rolled up and set aside and bring it back over to your work area.  Match up the edges of the dough sheets and unroll the top one.

Oops! I ran out of dough! No problem, I'll just use some of the scraps that I cut off later to finish the lonely pizza pockets.

Press down the dough in between all the toppings to seal them into their little square pockets.  Of course, the toppings are now inside their pockets, so I guess they're fillings, not toppings....oh well, let's not get hung up on technicalities. ;)

Ready for cutting!  I like to use my pizza wheel to cut my dough. I've found that it's much easier than using a knife. It doesn't pull through the dough like running a knife through it would and, since this is a non-stick pizza wheel, the dough doesn't stick!

Cut out all the pockets and trim off excess dough. Set aside the excess so that you can finish off the pockets that the top crust didn't quite reach.

Transfer the individual pockets onto a cookie sheet. I like to line my sheets with parchment paper, so I don't have to grease them. But if you use plain cookie sheets or foil-covered cookie sheets, you'll want to grease (and possibly flour or cornmeal) them so that everything comes off of the sheets easily (especially that melted cheese!).  Poke holes in the tops of the pockets to let steam escape.

Bake at 425 degrees F for about 8 minutes. Adjust the time for your oven so that you get nice golden brown pizza pockets.

Let them cool a little and pull them off the sheets onto a plate for serving. Mmmm! I'm hungry!

Dip them in pizza sauce or just eat them plain!

This recipe fed our small family of 3 for 2 full meals and another of just me and our daughter.  At each meal my husband and I each ate about 7 pockets and our 21 month old daughter ate about 4.  We reheated the pockets in a 350 degree F oven for 8-10 minutes and they reheated VERY well. This recipe definitely got 5 stars for our family.

~Regina

Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions. The comments are moderated, so I should see any questions, no matter how long it has been since this post was published.