Playdough Recipe Calculator: Exact Amounts for Any Number of Kids

How to use it

1. Pick the recipe first. Cooked on the stove, no-cook, or one of the bin-style ones like oobleck and moon sand. The safety notes change with it, so it’s worth a look before you start.
2. Say how many kids with the little minus and plus. Then choose the size of ball each one gets. The tool works out how many cups you need and rounds up to the next half batch.
3. Tap the pink words to change the color, then use the ingredient list. Switch between cups and grams with the buttons above it. Weighing flour on a kitchen scale is the easiest way to get the same dough every time.
4. Tick the steps off as you go, or press Cook mode to see one step at a time in big letters. Your screen stays on while it’s open, where the browser allows it.
5. Print it, copy the list to your phone, or share it with whoever’s helping.

A ball for each kid

Most playdough fights start when two kids want the same lump. I make one ball per kid before anyone sits down, which is what the picture shows.

The sizes are things you can hold in your hand. A regulation golf ball is at least 1.68 inches across, and a large orange is about 3 inches across, so those two are easy to picture. The tennis ball is the size I go by for a toddler who wants something to squish, about ⅔ cup of dough.

Doing a group? Make the batches one at a time. The tool tells you how many batches a group needs, because one giant pot is harder to stir than two small ones.

Cups and grams

Cups are fine for dough, and grams are better if you have a scale. A cup of flour can weigh quite a bit more or less depending on how you scoop it, and the difference shows up as sticky or crumbly dough.

The grams on this page are worked out from the weights the USDA publishes for each ingredient, then rounded: to the nearest gram for small amounts, and to the nearest 5 grams above 50 g. Salt is the surprise. A cup of table salt weighs more than twice what a cup of flour does, so it’s the one place a cup measure matters most, and one more reason this dough is for play and not for little mouths. The play sand in moon sand has no gram weight here, because sand varies too much. Measure that one in cups.

Which recipe?

• Classic cooked playdough is the soft, stretchy one and my default. It takes about 15 minutes on the stove, and the flour is cooked.
• No-cook playdough is ready in 10 minutes with boiling water from the kettle. It’s the quickest, and it uses raw flour, so I only pick it for kids who don’t put things in their mouth.
• Without cream of tartar uses lemon juice, for the day you reach for the jar and it’s empty.
• Gluten-free uses rice flour and cornstarch.
• For tasters is cooked and has far less salt. It’s still for playing, not eating, but it’s the one I make when my toddler was in the “everything goes in the mouth” stage. If you want more on that stage, I wrote a plain guide to playdough for toddlers and what to do with playdough at age two.
• Cloud dough, oobleck and moon sand are for a bin, a sheet outside, and a lot of mess. They’re a different kind of play from rolling and cutting.

Raw flour and salt

Two safety notes matter enough that the tool shows them whenever they apply.

Raw flour. The CDC says not to let kids play with or eat dough made with raw flour, because flour can carry germs and only cooking kills them. That’s why the no-cook and cloud dough recipes show a note, and why the cooked ones don’t.

Salt and pets. Homemade playdough has a lot of salt, and a pet that eats it can get salt poisoning, according to Pet Poison Helpline. Put the dough away after play and keep it off the floor. If a dog or cat does get some, call your vet right away.

Please stay close for any sensory play. Small pieces of dough and little cutters are a choking risk for babies and toddlers.

Once it’s made

Playing with the dough is the fun part. Once you have a few batches, you can try the ideas in 20 playdough activities that actually hold toddlers. For little hands, rolling, pinching and poking are real work, and these fine motor playdough activities and these hand-strength ideas put that to use.