Winter is a great time to make and use your own cheap pastes and using natural ingredients ensures you get all the potent bioactive goodies like live enzymes, bioflavonoids, essential oils and many important flavour components etc to work for you in your bait - so read on for more now on how to do it yourself!
It is so easy to make a simple effective paste that it surprises me how many carp anglers either have never done it or have only done it long ago in the paste and then forgotten how cheap, totally unique and very effective they can be! When I was about 6 years old I made my first carp bait. This paste or dough bait had a reputation for being good and my fishing friends got to make it and use it along with me. All this bait consisted of was a tub of complete readymade custard powder with enough added milk and water to form a dough that would hold onto the hook. These kind of simple baits were usually made quite hard so they lasted longer as they were quite soluble.
This instant carp bait was not as simple as it might first appear however and had many factors and effects that many modern baits have. The main attractor was vanilla flavour and in some brands the flavour actually did contain vanilla oleoresin which is the basis of one of the most popular flavours in human history and used in chocolate and all kinds of various other flavours and uses etc. Again as in many of my other articles, I refer to the fact that this product is released as a result of natural processes, in the case of natural vanilla, the natural fermentation of vanilla pods.
The base of the custard powder I used years ago was corn starch, which bound up very well with a range of liquids such as milk and water very well. Custard powders usually contain a lot of sugar, and being water soluble, the bait gave off lots of attraction to carp and is still in use today as an instant bait.
As carp anglers today seem to be mad on following fashions more than ever I thought it would be interesting to go into just one instant method of making a homemade bait using natural pineapple and banana as these are 2 very popular flavours today. Just like the old custard recipe you could actually simply use some very finely mashed up fruit and custard powder to bind it together. I would choose the ripest real pineapple and the ripest blackest banana to make the bait.
The fermentation processes going on in the ripened mature fruit will ensure a huge amount of natural acids to attract the fish (among other factors,) and the fruits will provide many direct and indirect nutritional benefits too including live enzymes, sugars, inulin flavonoids, oils etc. I have been much more into raw food diets and detoxifying regimes, probiotic and prebiotic foods and so on, not to lose weight, but to boost health, vitality, disease resistance, boost over all energy levels and brain function, to boost the heart, liver, blood circulation and the ability to regulate the acid - alkali levels in the body etc which all contribute to keeping the body young and working at peak efficiency.
I used to miss the awesome connections between various health and diet regimes and carp bait design. One interesting aspect is how many acidic or acid-effect forming foods are really excellent carp baits and ingredients and additves etc. One pertinent point is that wheat is the most acid-forming food. In fact high protein milk derivatives and fractions for example, and various fish meals, especially produced using acids to pre-digest them, are very attractive and stimulating to carp.
Milk sugar too has significant impacts as in carp it lowers the pH of the digestion substrate around it and appears to improve digestion of high protein ingredients etc. Personally I find just the smell and taste of extra-sweetened or pure milk sugar addictive!
I you want to make more resilient pastes many substances will do this and at the same time add a wide range of additional practical and nutritional benefits making pastes even more attractive - especially in the cold of winter, but any time of year.
I have few qualms about what I make paste from as the only aim is to get bites and in cold weather any bites are a bonus. For cheaper pastes the base is usually a carbohydrate carrier. I have been making milk gluten-free fruit pies over Christmas some with mine meat and some with banana and other fruits. Starting the day off with fresh grapefruit is great, but having pineapple and orange chunks is a breathtaking change if you are not into fruit and subsist on wheat based cereals and wheat based bread and toast for instance! Imagine all those readymade baits containing hard wheat (semolina) and the potential successful impacts of using alternative binders instead!)
On the home baking shelves in super markets you can find all kinds of things to try out including corn starch, rice flour, ground and powdered nuts plus some unique flavours which are not based on ascetic acid and water but natural oils for example. Why not try some of the mint, and chocolate and citrus ones together?!
Lemon juice is a well proven additive. Although acidic it has an alkaline-forming effect on the blood in humans which is very healthy. Related to this, I believe this kind of effect is part of its attraction to carp too besides having a healthy ascorbic acid content which has effects such as helping in detoxifying the liver (which is something I know is of great importance internally in carp!) Lemon is a particularly acidic ingredient which must have further digestion implications and benefits in the lower pH digestion in carp assisting natural and microbial digestive enzyme activity on baits.
I have been doing quite a bit of home baking recently, partly as a result of being snowed in and partly just to be creative to make something new, unique, fresh, tasty and healthy that cannot be bought in the shops!
Having just made another pie batch and tasting fresh pie reminded me of just how incredibly tangy fresh banana is when mixed with various mixtures - and how moorish it is! Saying that, making your own pastry is very interesting because if you sample it as you go it tastes great too - and that is obviously a good indicator that the baked pie will be well worth making!
Pastry mix is an old general fishing bait that has been used for all kinds of fish for decades, and can very easily be boosted or flavoured and so on. I prefer to make homemade pastry as this simple act really can remind you or teach you quite a lot about making baits for big carp with just a bit of imagination and applied thinking about natural carp feeding triggers, analogues of attractors and so on.
In my case I was trying out a readymade no-egg type of product primarily consisting of potato starch. Making baits without eggs for winter is also a very interesting area and such baits are much more digestible and perform really well in the cold. This no-egg product was used to form the pie filling, which in my last batch consisted of chopped pecan nuts, mashed ripe banana, raw molasses, various spices and a little sea salt. Fennel seed powder (rather reminiscent of aniseed) is a great little product for improving digestion and imparting quite different tastes etc to pies - and carp baits too!
If you are afraid of making your very own homemade baits it is a really good idea to start with making bread or pastry and make your own goodies that you can enjoy and learn lots about the art and science of bait-making along the way.
If you are intending to keep a new year promise to lose more weight then home baking is a great idea because you can do it without butter, without eggs and without milk, and drastically cut your intake of refined sugar, which in my opinion is as much of a problem as anything you might have heard about saturated fats or excessive cereal carbohydrate intakes like that of wheat (that seems to be in everything these days!)
If you want to make a really alternative nutritional flavouring, perhaps try fast-steaming finely chopped carrot, spinach, beetroot and broccoli and liquidise these to form a concentrate. I will leave it to you to discover how sweet, betaine-rich, mineral rich and other bioactives-rich such a liquid is. Maybe from your home baking you will also discover creative ways of exploiting oleoresin-rich vanilla pods in your carp baits (Carp really love all those tiny black power-packed black seeds!) (For much more information see my website and biography right now!)
By Tim Richardson.
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