There are thousands of recipes for slime out there but for simplicity you can’t beat cornflour and you can also use it for a yummy cheese pasta for tea. One of the first things I learned to cook on the hob was white sauce and this recipe uses the method I was taught.
Ingredients
Slime: cornflour, water, bowl, spoon, optional food colouring
Pasta: cornflour, butter, milk, salt, pasta, optional nutmeg, frozen peas, cheddar cheese
Recipe
1. Prepare your supper
Boil a kettle and cook the pasta according to the pack instruction
2. Make your slime
Put approx. one cup of cornflour in a bowl
Add half a cup of water and a few drops of food colour if using
Stir carefully - add a little more water to make the slime the desired consistency
3. Prepare the sauce
Melt 40g butter in a saucepan
Add 25g cornflour and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, for one minute
Take the pan off the heat and add 450mL milk
Add the milk gradually to avoid lumps, stiring all the time
Back on the heat, continue stirring and cook until the sauce thickens
It should coat the back of the spoon
Add salt, pepper, nutmeg and grated cheese to taste (if using)
3. Finish making supper
Just before the pasta is done, add a handful of peas to the pasta water
Drain the pasta and peas, add the white sauce and warm through
Serve topped with more cheese if liked
Notes
What’s going on? The science in a sentence…The mixture flows like a liquid but when you squeeze it it feels like a solid; this is called a non-Newtonian fluid.
Why is this important for our daily lives?
As well as allowing Radzi from Blue Peter to walk on custard non-Newtonian fluids can be used for impact protection in sports, miltary applications and phone cases and also in lots of industrial applications. Scientists and engineers need to understand the properties of the many non-Newtonian fluids, for example, most paint is also non-Newtonian but it behaves differently to the slime we made, which by the way is called oobleck after a Dr. Suess book). Paint has to flow easily when applied but not drip down the wall afterwards. Next time you shake ketchup to get it out of the bottle, you can thank the non-Newtonian properties as it gets runnier when it is shaken. You can find out more about non-Newtonian fluids here.
For supper, if sauce stirring seems like too much hard work, there is a microwave white sauce recipe on the SimplyBeingMum blog and you can use leftover white sauce to make all sorts of dishes including lasagne, pasta/potato/vegetable bakes and fish pie. You can also add food colour to the white sauce to make slime pasta 🙂
If you have the ingredients, there are some great recipes for different types of slime on Science Sparks.
