When I go to a cooking blog I hate seeing the giant scroll bar… and no visible recipe. I know you love your grandmother, but I just want to see the recipe. So, here is the bubble juice recipe. A long story will probably be here on this blog, but below the recipe – where it belongs! ha ha
Guar Gum Bubble Juice Recipe
Ingredients
15.5 cups hot water (tap water hot, not boiling)
1 teaspoon Guar Gum powder
2 Tablespoons rubbing alcohol
1/2 cup + 1.5 Tablespoons Dawn Soap
2 teaspoons baking powder
Instructions
- Reserve 1 cup of water for guar gum, later. Add soap to water and mix well. Try to avoid making too much foam.
- Mix alcohol & guar gum to wet the guar gum. Add the reserved water to make a slurry.
- Add the slurry to the soap/water, mix well.
- Add baking powder to mixture and stir.
Notes:
- Guar gum does not work for a concentrate. Mix full strength.
- If mix gets foamy, spray a little alcohol on foam – not too much, the alcohol weakens the mix.
- Mix is ready to use immediately, but can be stored. If stored, the cornstarch will settle out of the baking powder and be a white powder at the bottom of container. This makes no difference. You can ignore it or stir it back in.
- Dawn is the preferred dish soap, but any P&G dish soap will likely work (Dawn, Joy, Fairy, Gain, Ivory).
- Palmolive also works, but is not as good as Dawn.
- Johnson’s Baby Shampoo will work ok, and is good for foaming a kid’s hair – it is non-tear formula.
Recipe Source: https://soapbubble.fandom.com/wiki/Recipes_Guar
There! See cooking blogs… that is how it is done. now I will babble for a while…
I use a large paint bucket to mix the recipe, then pour it into 2 liter Coke bottles for storage. I somehow seem to always have lots of empty coke bottles ha ha
The recipe is very simple, the only thing that might need explaining is the guar gum. They say that mixing it with the alcohol helps to separate it and keep it from clumping. I do not know – I just do it because they say to. After you mix it with the alcohol add the reserved hot water and mix with a fork or whisk. The guar gum becomes a jelly.
As soon as it starts to thicken, add it to the mixture. Do not let it harden or it will stay separated, and not mix in. Because of the photos and videos, this batch did not go well. The guar gum got hard and never mixed into the juice. Good thing a bad batch really only costs 1/2 cup of dish soap.
I add soap/water to the guar gum slurry, and mix it in the cup, to begin thinning it down. I keep stirring it and letting water in and out of the cup. Then finally it is all mixed into the bucket. Let the mixture sit a few minutes to let the guar gum hydrate fully, then mix again.
You want to mix the ingredients well, but you do not want to make too much foam. So, mix carefully, but thoroughly.
After it is all mixed, you can pour it into whatever container you will store it in, or use it right away.
If there is too much foam, you will end up with a half bottle of foam (bottle messed up on purpose for photo). That is why I added a hose to the end of my funnel. Not sure if I “invented” it, but I do not recall seeing anyone use one for pouring bubble juice. The hose extends down far enough that when you pour, the liquid is added below its own surface – and makes less foam.
This was my first time to use the funnel with the hose, and it worked as well as I hoped. I would like the hose to be about 3 inches longer, but such is life.
Making Rope Wands
For the giant bubbles, you will need two wands and a rope triangle. You can use most anything as your wands. I was going to order some collapsible carbon fiber fishing rods but one of our helpers grabbed some bamboo and carved handles for me. So I have 3 foot bamboo wands.
On each wand I attached a small carabiner, to hold the rope bubble maker.
Take about nine feet of rope and remove its core. Tie the ends together and tie in a small nut as a weight. That will be the bottom point of the triangle. The weight helps the triangle keep its shape.
On the two upper corners of the triangle tie loops, to attach to the carabiners. This way you can use one set of wands for multiple bubble ropes.
For ginormous bubbles you use the triangle as is. For a nest of bubbles, use the rope core and tie a net design. This gives you very cool multi-bubble wand. Kids are impressed by the giant bubble… but popping one bubble is not so much fun. They really prefer multiple bubbles.
