Make Magic Mud From A Potato
This magical glowing mixture is very strange because it handles like pizza dough, but the instant you stop moving, it liquefies and melts into a glowing goo.
In this project, you’ll see how to turn your ordinary garden potatoes, into this fluorescent magical mud.
Let’s get started by grabbing a big bag of potatoes, and washing the outsides so they’re all nice and clean.
Now we need to chop these up into the smallest pieces possible so, for convenience, I’m using a food processor.
If you don’t have one, you can always chop your potatoes with a knife and cutting board.
When you’ve got your potatoes reduced to tiny bits, slide them all into a large mixing bowl, and pour in enough hot water to cover them completely. We’ll need to stir this around for a few minutes, and you may have noticed the water turning red, and that’s completely normal.
Now let’s grab a strainer and another large bowl, so we can separate the potato water from the chunks, then watch closely as something incredible begins to happen.
After about 10 minutes, you can see a strange white layer appears at the bottom of the bowl.
Now if we try pouring everything out, you can see this new white layer, amazingly, stays in the bottom.
The goop is a little bit dirty, so to clean it, let’s mix in a bit of freshwater, and pour it into a tall thin container, like a glass or a jar.
When the lid is on tight, let’s just shake it all up again, then let it sit for another 10 minutes.
Once again, you can see it separates into layers, and this time, almost all the impurities are collected in the middle.
Now check this out.
If we quickly dump out the water, it takes most of the impurities with it, leaving us with a very clean, and magical substance.
It kind of looks like milk, but if you try stirring it around, you can see it behaves very strangely.
Now if this goo is left out for a day or two, you can see it will crumble into a powder without much effort at all.
And that’s exactly what we need, to take this to the next level, and add the glow.
The magic happens with a bottle of tonic water because it contains quinine.
If you turn on a black light, you’ll notice the water fluoresces, and the whole bottle looks completely supernatural.
Now let’s go ahead and put a few spoonfuls of our magical white powder in a bowl, then try mixing in small amounts of tonic water to see what happens.
In just a few seconds it becomes amazingly difficult to stir, because the magic goop hardens, every time we push on it.
With a little patience, everything should combine, and behave exactly the way it did before.
The difference this time is that now it’s fluorescent.
If we turn on some black lights, you can see the magic mud takes on a mystical
glow, and looks and feels a lot like pizza dough, as long as we move it around constantly.
If you pause for just a second though, the dough collapses into a glowing goo, and slimes down between your fingers.
But maybe that’s ok, as long as you’re in the mood to make a mess.
I tried pouring some out of a flask, and rather than dropping straight down, you can see it actually flowed out in a rippled wave.
It’s mind-blowing to think this stuff is inside our potatoes, but if you don’t feel like going to all the trouble to get it out, just use cornstarch or potato starch instead.
Bob’s Red Mill Potato Starch
It will work exactly the same.
Well now you know how to turn ordinary potatoes, into a glowing magical mud, that’s non-toxic, easy to make, and even safe to eat.