10 Gluten Free Play Dough Recipes

You can’t buy Play Doh if you can’t eat gluten. It’s made with wheat. And worse, it’s sticky. It gets gluten all over the play surface, all over the children playing, all over everything they touch for hours after. It’s under their fingernails and stuck in cracks in the table. Total nightmare.

Thankfully there are so many fun homemade alternatives to commercial Play Doh. I have a Board for them on Pinterest that I’m steadily adding to. Here’s a few I have so far. Pin Away!!

If you’re not signed up with Pinterest, don’t worry, you don’t need an account to view the pins. To go to the recipe, just click the picture on the “pin” and it will take you to the original site.

Yum! This one is edible! Kids have so much fun making and eating their creations! If you share your kitchen with gluten-eaters, make sure you use a fresh, crumb free jar for this recipe.

I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks so easy! I bet it smells great! I like the recipe because you don’t need to cook it on the stove. Very handy.

Wow! This one looks so weird and fantastic! I don’t have vanilla hair conditioner, so I wonder if I could use body lotion. I have a lot of body lotion. If you’re doing this one, use Kraft pudding and make sure your conditioner is gluten free. (no hydrolized proteins or tocopheral acetate or Vitamin E. Aussie Brand has some safe ones.) And if you try body lotion, let me know. 🙂

A variation on the chocolate pudding. YUM! I think I might make this one today. I wonder if there’s an edible substitute for the conditioner. You know, just in case.

I LOVE this one! The first time we made it we only had Daddy’s very manly scented shaving cream, so we called it Man Playdough. Now we buy shaving cream for sensitive skin with a lot less scent. Make this one on a day you have a lot of patience, it’s messy and it takes a lot of tweaking to get the amounts just right. But it’s so fun when you do!

This is the recipe I usually make. It’s a great base for all those fun theme playdoughs you see on Pinterest. You can add food coloring, essential oils or spices to make it special. Right now the big thing is orange food coloring and pumpkin spice for fall. For Christmas you could use red and green food coloring and peppermint oil or extract.

This is the one we have going on now. It’s still a little too hot to play in the sandbox, so we brought some sand inside! It’s great because it dries completely and you just need to add water to reconstitute it in the morning so we just leave it on our play tray (a restaurant sized cookie sheet) on the counter. It sweeps up off the floor easily if you just wait for it to dry. And it doesn’t get moldy or slimy like some homemade playdough can. We’re on day 5 of our current batch.

This was my favorite when we lived in Thailand because rice flour was abundant and cheap! You can use either cornstarch or arrowroot if you have corn allergies in your house. (Tapioca or potato starch might work here too.)

A variation of the rice flour play dough made in the crock pot! You’ll need to check it every 30 mins, so don’t put it in and go grocery shopping. (That’s a note for me, I know you wouldn’t do that.)

Does this count as playdough? I LOVE flubber!! It’s so much fun to make! We make this faithfully every year right after the back to school sales. What else are we going to do with all those 25cent bottles of Elmer’s Glue? (And Elmer’s Glue is Gluten Free! And they’re nice enough to let you know on their website http://www.elmers.com/about/faqs/general – The only Elmer’s product that contains gluten is their fingerpaints which contain wheat and oats.)

I have a small but growing board of my favorite gluten free playdough recipes! I’d love it if you stopped by and check it out. Click HERE to visit my Gluten Free Playdough Board. If you have your own gluten free playdough recipe on your blog, leave a link in the comments! I have a very busy four year old and we’re always looking for new things to try!