Boilie Morsels

Many moons ago I wrote an article for Carpworld outlining my strategy for making "boilie particles", which was a term used by Tim Paisley in a lot of his early bait pieces.

Personally, I did not understand what Tim was getting at and as it later turned out when I asked him, he meant by this term any HNV bait that was created so as to mimic the action and appearance of a normal particle carpet using, for instance, pulses or beans.

In order to carry Tim's idea through to its (to me) logical conclusion, I came up with the idea of particles made using boilie paste.

In the original article, we used an old Spong Mincer to create the particles, which were boiled in small batches and dried as normal.

The resulting 'particles' were ideal in my mind and one of the pix we took showed my missus offering them to our cat, who adored them! It lead me to recall something the boss of Fox International at the time, Max Cottis, told me, namely: If you want to know if your bait is acceptable to carp, offer it to your cat. If the cat will eat it so will the carp, a maxim that has proved correct on many occasions and I have used this photo many times since to illustrate Max's point.

A simple hair rig carrying a single boilie morsel - my name for them - accounted for a number of carp from Salamander Lake for both myself and my missus.

Here's Tat with a lovely Salamander near-leather.

Looking back over the years, more years than I care to mention, to be honest, I wondered if Haith's Baits users might be interested in an updated method of making boilie morsels, but first I needed to create a suitable base mix. I, therefore, came up with a simple recipe using Haith's Bait's ingredients, namely Red Factor, Haith's CLO, Haith's standard fishmeal and finely ground Haith's High Protein Crumb. The bait was rounded off with Whey Protein and Robin Green.

To add oomph to the bait I added a few of Feed Stimulants' excellent products, namely Liquid Goose Liver…

…Liquid Enzyme Treated Yeast…

…and their superb Green Lipped Mussel Concentrate. This is a full-fat version which is much more attractive than other types which have the fat content removed. I use this in virtually every bait I make these days, so highly do I rate it.

The Concentrate was added to the base mix.

To flavour the bait I used Feed Stimulant's Crayfish flavour, a lovely well-balanced attractor that smells and tastes (in the finished bait) like eating fresh lobster.

The Robin Green was added to the 400g of the base mix at 10%.

5ml of the flavour was added to three large eggs along with…

…30ml of the Goose Liver and the same of the Yeast.

The eggs and liquid ingredients were lightly whipped with a fork before the final additions were made, namely…

…5ml of SuperStim…

…and 15ml of Tesco's Good Oil (hemp oil).

The liquid and powdered ingredients were mixed together thoroughly using the wife's pastry blender (ideal tool for the job but ask permission first!).

Next, the bait was formed into small balls…you'll see why in the next photo.

I am going to use an electric mincer in this experiment, hoping to create a more uniform particle. The small balls of paste are deliberately kept small so as o feed into the machine more easily.

Here you can see the strings of extruded paste coming out of the mincer where they are collected in the same mixing bowl I used to form the paste. You will note that there is some dry crumb in the bowl too and this is there to help prevent the strings from sticking together.

Once extruded the coated paste strings are separated into individual baits. This is easily done using a fork or your fingers.

Next, the bait is boiled for three minutes.

It is then dried on a towel, again using crumb to absorb the residual dampness that is on the baits and to keep them separate.

And here is the finished bait after it has cooled on the towel overnight. They are now ready to be used or they can be stored in the fridge for up to a week.

Finally, it is a good idea to keep back a lump of paste to use as lead wraps or as hookbaits (wrapped in stocking mesh).

And here's one I caught while testing the new Robins including Robin Green recently.

Written by Ken Townley