Homemade Carp and Catfish Fishing Paste Baits and Pellets

A vital part of fishing success is the right bait. The soluble part of you bait that leaches into the water is especially critical to success. This is a key characteristic of many proven baits for many species and especially on waters that are pressured constantly by angling activities.

There are many occasions where on a busy water; fish are used to eating a particularly popular bait, perhaps fishmeal boilies or pellets. By incorporating that bait into the make-up of your personal secret paste bait (or boilies for that matter,) you can really reap the rewards of the fish treating popular baits as “natural food” better than those using “standard baits.”

Being more soluble and having a far faster leak-off of attraction than conventional “boilies,” pastes are very versatile bait option. You can even coat boilies and pellets, fish cubes, meat chunks, pet foods, particles etc in pastes too. (Tip: If you ground bait by feeding with boilies coated in paste and using a paste coated bait, big results can come your way, I’ve found.) Paste can be made with water, or eggs or a range of liquids for diverse effective purposes. With water or milk for instance the bait is already based on a solvent, so can dissolve far faster and release attractors and triggers quicker than less soluble egg based baits.

Very soluble baits are very useful for boosting a swim with quickly dissolving attraction and moulding around hooks, leads, method feeder, leads etc. You can use a liquid consisting partly of water and of eggs to alter solubility and binding for instance.

Eggs are very nutritional and help a paste bait bind and last in the water. (It also has better binding qualities than water.) Often ground up fishmeal pellets like “Marine” pellets with eggs and a little additional “Marine” pellet oil, or even tiger nut oil, can be a devastating edge. There are thousands of ingredients, additives, taste enhancers, feeding stimulants like palatants and amino acids supplements available to differentiate your personal baits.

The great thing is, you can use your personal homemade paste as your “secret edge” when fishing a commercially produced ready made bait against others using the same ready made bait. I’ve out-fished other anglers by using this edge enough to recommend its value and the time and effort put into the exact paste for the fishing situation can seriously pay-off “big-time!”

Your ingredients do not need to be complicated although you can get very potent baits when you know more about fish nutrition, true feeding triggers and many of the most potent attractors. So you could start with bread paste or corn flour, with any kind of flavour, even the supermarket baking types. Even the ascetic acid based ones catch fish, but supermarket flavours are mostly water and alcohol or propylene glycol for example, which are easily soluble; acting as effective “exploratory signals” in the water for carp.

Many flavours have proven in tank tests to have zero stimulatory properties in themselves and most have zero or extremely little in them of any food value. (With many it’s the effect of the substance on water itself.) Fishermen are fixated by flavours as the “old conditioning” kicks in. What I mean is commercial baits are mostly labelled with a “flavour tag name.” One of the most recognisable and proven is the proprietary fishing and food flavour called “Tutti Fruitti.” (You can make your own flavours like this with ease, with a few “field trials” they can be awesome.)

Other examples of such labels which may lead to conditioning the thinking because anglers focus on “the name or flavour or label” are: “Pineapple,” “maple,” “shellfish plum” “peach and black pepper” “squid and octopus” “caramel cream” “scopex” “garlic cheese,” “black squid,” “red salmon,” etc. The contemporary commercial bait manufacturers’ trend is more to infer or describe the nutritional attraction and liquid “foods” in a commercial bait. These names infer much more than just “attraction” but provide valuable nutritional signals and a recognisable nutritious meal.

Such examples are: “Active 8 with activator,” “Matrix with Matrix liquid,” “Trigga ice with liquid trigga ice,” “Grange with CSL 1 & 2″ etc. These baits are far more like the ones you are recommended to make yourself, but that takes experience and deep knowledge of carp physiology, carp nutrition, ingredients, triggers and so on. But having said that, you can make very many effective homemade types of paste baits and boilies without knowing how or why they work and they’ll still catch you fish.

Even baits that you think are over-loaded or do not smell or taste enough will catch fish and it is far more common for a homemade bait to catch than to fail. In fact using a new bait is always an edge in itself often producing some of the biggest fish! You homemade baits do not need to match any of your own sensory perceptions either. So if you think a bait has to smell and taste like a ripe strawberry or pineapple to be successful, this is far from being the case. Many highly effective baits are not on the market because they’d make you throw-up! Even fermenting maize and tiger nuts and hemp aromas for example, will make you feel like that if you stay too close for too long. There is a big hint in this.

Do not over-look what at first appears to be simple “or crap” baits. I’ve been making fishing baits for 30 years plus and have made some very complex ones with cutting-edge additives and ingredients, but simple ones will work fished against complex ones. Often the ability and confidence levels of the angler is just as important as what bait he’s using.

A simple and economical paste bait which works for carp (and catfish) big and small which can be “bulked-up” with many various added binding materials and additives. Pork luncheon meat liquidised with Marmite and eggs. You can add cheap wheat flour, or semolina, or soya flour, or much more expensive high protein whey protein powders, lactalbumin or calcium caseinate for instance. You can add ingredients to alter its nutritional properties, feeding triggers profile, taste and smell and soluble attraction and function.

As a bait “base” and with slight adaptation, will catch big fish anywhere and turn it into boilies too. Liquidised cat foods and dogwoods, “Chum Mixer” and far lesser cheaper products can be used to substitute luncheon meat if required. Why turn your nose up at a simple bait before you look more closely at triggers and attractors inside it; many are those in commercially made baits and pastes anyway. The natural flavour of your bait is all you need with many such homemade baits; they already have taste enhancers, palatants and other feeding triggers designed into them to boost their already natural levels. Dog, cat food and other pet food manufacturers do this to get better feeding response. Ask yourself why some dog foods have over 12 forms of bacteria on the ingredients list…

Luncheon meat is a good protein source and has water added, so it is to a degree soluble. It has rich attractive oils which act as feeding stimulation. It has been processed so its all important soluble nutritional signals levels will vary from brand to brand as will solubility, meat content (protein content) salt content etc. Think about it and many edges will reveal themselves. Why not wrap a cube of luncheon meat in luncheon meat paste. Often big fish come on this form of bait. Fish are stimulated by the paste coating and perhaps activity by smaller fish on the bait. Using a big cube of luncheon meat as your hook bait can be very effective coated in paste. On such a bait usually the only fish big enough to actually get it in their mouths and be hooked are the ones we want!

Nutritionally there are many similarities between pork and poultry products so “en vogue” as alternative high protein sources and used in ready made boilies far more now. One other very notable environmentally responsible ingredient is very comparable with fish meals in nutrition. It has the usual practical uses in baits and is “hydrolysed” (in this case for example, steam cooked and dehydrated) feather meal, composed of “cooked keratin.” This poultry bye-product can be up to 99 percent protein.

I could go into another simple example using betaine rich fermented shrimp paste (or “Belachan”) with additional tasty additions like liquid yeast and CSL, but I think you’re getting the picture. “Haribo” sweets are interesting alternative baits but with gelatine, combined with known carp ingredients to make soluble baits are again endless. The extremely productive possibilities of always having a bait on your hook that your fish have never had repeated experience of, are endless. It really makes you think about the advantages, “edges” and huge potential results from doing it for yourself.

When you think of other that were once “homemade” for inspiration, you don’t have to look far. Many great inventions by “amateurs” which turned into huge commercial phenomena were born on the kitchen table… The author has many other “edges” to reveal…

By Tim Richardson.