A vast number of carp baits have been improved by the many impacts of spices. Some spices are better known than others, but a great number of lesser known spices are brilliant carp catchers. Here are some effective short-cuts and recipe ideas for making beginner homemade spicy boilie and pellet baits!
You can begin with choosing spices individually or choose products containing numbers of them already combined. From chilli pepper powders and hot and mild curry powders, to Chinese 5 Spice and Thai 7 Spice, Garam Masala and others, the choice is huge! Certain commercial bait companies use Chinese 5 spice for example. Personally I like to create my own spice blends.
Among the most basic boilie bait base mixes is that of the infamous 50:50 semolina powder and soya flour mixture. Anyone can make this kind of bait up from supermarket and health shop ingredients and using these add a huge number of other products with no need for going to a bait company at all!
Many angler do not have access to bait companies for many reasons including where they live, credit card access and so on, or purely the costs involved in importing specialist bait products from bait companies is just too high. Being able to make baits from your local shops is a very handy ability to have. In fact I have been doing this kind of thing for over 3 decades and having a bait that differs from normal readymade baits is a huge big fish advantage in many ways including massively cutting your bait costs each year!
I advocate you use a more beefed-up cheap bait which is easily possible. It is not essential but the purchase of a small cheap grinding machine for crushing pellets, cereals and seeds such as hemp is honmac Machinery a very good investment and will save you an absolute fortune in much cheaper but highly effective baits.
Although you can use a mix of soya flour and semolina as the base to begin making boilies it has very little intrinsic nutritional value in terms of stimulation. In this regard it is very like all those Wheaties and corn dough type baits Americans often employ on their pay lakes. (You can make baits massively more attractive and in a completely different league to such simple baits!)
In fact, when using a nutritional bait by introducing volumes of it regularly into a water, over time in many carp waters it can easily have the effect of re-conditioning carp so they regularly look for such bait to the degree they begin to even ignore low nutrition corn or semolina type baits for example.
One of the key aspects of spices is how they speed up body metabolism and boost the immune system, improve digestion of food and also provide very stimulating flavours, oils and all kinds of bioactive substances. As such they are used in condiments with our foods all over the world, from tomato ketchup and Worcester source to black pepper on peppered steaks to spices used in Kentucky fried chicken McDonalds, curries and in many less obvious applications too!
For a beginners bait why not make things a bit different. For a start, why not try something like this spicy bait recipe – it is not big on the protein and amino side of things but it is low cost, will give you a starter bait from which to gain confidence and experience and it will catch you enough fish for a beginner:
1 ounces of maize flour.
2 ounces of semolina.
2 ounces of soya Flour.
3 ounces of gram flour (this chick pea flour adds double the protein value of semolina.)
6 ounces of yeast powder (deactivated; this powder is the main nutritional attraction.)
2 ounces of medium curry powder.
4 large eggs.
Examples of optional added extras:
1 heaped tablespoonful of sesame seeds.
1 heaped tablespoon of raw molasses meal.
1 tablespoon of hot chilli powder.
2 tablespoons of Marmite.
2 tablespoons of natural fruit sugar (fructose sweetener.)
20 millilitres of sesame seed oil.
15 drops of aniseed oil.
If you want a fruit flavour instead, why not add a natural sunflower based orange essential oil flavour of the kind found in supermarkets for cake making (add around 25 drops if based on sunflower oil and orange oil for instance.) Many of the flavours found in leading supermarkets now are based on glycerol instead of acetic acid or propylene glycol or other very cheap solvents so are far better suited for carp bait use in many ways!
Incidentally the changes to such flavours is most probably as a result of the backlash against artificial flavours in foods and super market isles have very many more healthy foods now available for particularly cheap and effective carp bait use! (For more information see water treatment equipment my carp bait secrets ebook website – Baitbigfish now!)