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Making paste .

Stephen Pritchard

Stephen Pritchard

Senior Member
Anyone got any good paste making recipes for making a cheap paste . I don't really want to go down the expensive boilie base mix road.
 
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The one i've used with success is equal portions of ready made short crust pastry, blue cheese and the strongest cheddar you can get hold of. Roll out the pastry then grate the cheese over it, add a couple of teaspoons of garlic puree and kneed it all together. You can add a food or boilie colouring to it if you wish but not convinced it makes a massive difference.

Divide it into equal portions and freeze, smells great and more importantly it works.
 
1/3 fishmeal (something like provimi 66), 1/3 ground pellet (ellips or halibut), 1/3 ground hemp. You can use exactly the same mix in the feeder. Caught a lot of Barbel with that, summer and winter.
 
If it's a fishy paste you're after I just used some fishmeal based method mix groundbait. I beat 2 eggs and added enough groundbait until I got what I wanted and job done. Fish seem to like it.
 
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Something I've tried this year, I've not caught on it yet but a mate of mine has:rolleyes:

1/4of a kilo of spicey boilie, ground back into powder. Halibut crush groundbait (approx 200 grams)

5ml of LO30

1ml Intense sweetener

Two teaspoons of garlic powder ( I'd run out of powder so substituted granules and a couple of cloves of fresh)

Sea salt and black pepper and 4 eggs.

TBH, I'm not overly confident of the amount of boilies and ground bait used as I pretty much played it by eye

The resultant paste is quite coarse and not very sticky but it will mould around a lead and boilie or pellets and stays moulded for up to 20 minutes
 
cheap

If you want cheap paste just mix sausage meat with cornflour - wait till after christmas and you'll get 1/2kg of sausage meat for about 50p from most supermarkets. Fold in cornflour until it stops sticking to your hands - job done.

If you want to get fancy, add crushed hemp for texture, garlic puree or cayenne pepper for flavour. :)
 
Paul Garner said:
1/3 fishmeal (something like provimi 66), 1/3 ground pellet (ellips or halibut), 1/3 ground hemp. You can use exactly the same mix in the feeder. Caught a lot of Barbel with that, summer and winter.
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Hi Paul,

Did you use this as a genuine on-the-hook paste, capable of staying put....or just as a wrap around your boilies? I am curious because I have tried ground elips pellets (in powder form, as sold by Hinders) but found it so granular and incredibly oily that it was almost impossible to turn into a decent paste, no matter what I mixed with it...and ground hemp certainly won't help with that problem :p So...is the provimi fishmeal the binder that sorted this issue for you (I didn't try that :D) and turned it into a decent paste, or as I say, were you using it as a slow disolve boilie wrap?

Best regards,

Dave.
 
Andrew Boyne said:
Dave, a sieve might help in your quest for smooth . . . .
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Oooh no, they make my bum itch :p

Seriously though, lumps or inconsistencies in the ground pellet powder was not the problem. The best way I can describe it is that it looked and felt like brown, very oily sand. It was never going to bind into a paste on it's own, nor with the several binders, with or without eggs, that I tried.

I can only assume that the fishmeal that Paul tried worked much more successfully as a binder than the stuff I used, OR he was using it merely as a slow dissolve wrap on his boilies (my paste just about coped with that) OR that he had no problems binding it at all, which would mean I just had a naff batch of pellet powder :D

Cheers, Dave.
 
Hi Dave,

I was using it as a wrap around a matching pellet (either ellips or halibut) as I prefer to use a hair but I think it would have been good enough to use on it's own, I just had more confidence with it around a pellet. In the winter I would often leave a bait out for over an hour and it would still be there when I brought it in. When you're leaving a bait out that long though I much prefer to have it wrapped around something (you don't get many chances on the Loddon and the last thing you want is to be wasting time fishing without any bait).

I hadn't considered that the fishmeal was the key to making it bind as there was no planning in the ingredients as the original mix was never intended as a paste. That is the mix I always used in the feeder when fishing pellet and one weekend I decided to try to make a paste out of it. So a happy accident that it happened to work well.

I always made a 2 egg mix and couldn't tell you how much dry I put in as I just kept adding from my feeder mix until it 'worked', so I don't think it was that critical as I can't remember ever screwing a batch up, and I used that mix over several seasons with different batches of ingredients.
 
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The high oil content of elips (and most other fish based pellets) can often lead to the oily sand type that Dave refers to. What you need for a robust paste is fibre and/or another binder.
I did a lot of experiments and came up with a number of mixes that stayed on the hook very well and more importantly caught loads of fish. The Wye fishers named the bait BWBB (Bob's Wonderful Barbel Bait) and it accounted for many PB's, including my own BA fish.
So enough of trumpet blowing what was in it?
It was a medium tech bait and in it's most simplified form contained finely ground elips, Trigga Ice and egg albumen. Although some of the later versions contained small tweaks it was very successful. The formulation made great boilies and steamies as well.
45% Finely ground elips, 45% Trigga Ice, 10% Egg Albumen. If it was purely for boilies and steamies then you can drop the egg albumen level to 3 to 5%.
I used eggs to make the paste, but water made stuff was OK.
You could simplify and experiment with various other binders (eg CLO) but I wanted a bait that maximised the pellet content and used established ingredients.
Alternatively try making paste with Short crust pastry mix or bread - we know that fish like these. One parting comment is try DRY pastry mix - keep a bag handy - less moisture and hassle than the frozen. Cheap at your local supermarket.

Cheers
Bob
 
I did a recipe in my 'floody hell' article I did for BFW a good few years ago Steve....

https://barbel.co.uk/site/vbulletin/forum/tales-stories/5775-floody-hell-steve-williams.html

I still use the same paste now, and its still catching.
Its cheap, easy to make, stays on the hook well and is still catching fish to this day.

If you click the link, and scroll down towards the bottom, there is a 'BAIT' section.....

I know a few lads also use it to great effect.....

Steve

PS, was it really 2005????!!!!!
 
Trigger ice base mix with as much salmon oil in it as you can get it to take. This is very easy to make and produces a lovely stiff paste that can be wrapped around a pellet or boile. I usually add a bit of black pepper essential oil. This worked very well for me last season, this season not so well.........

I may have got the idea from Bob Gill come to think of it.

It's also an excellent winter chub bait, the salmon oil leeches off even at very low temperatures and fish soon find it.
 
For a good, not too soft fish meal paste I use around 6 eggs to a kilo of fishmeal.
Put it in a food processor and whizz until your happy with consistency
For cheesepaste I've tried all sorts and my preferred method is,
Equal amounts of mature cheddar and liquidised white bread.
Throw in some spicy black pepper and around 100g of Danish blue. Stick in a food processor and whiz the heck out of it!
Once it looks totally blended take it out and make into balls. Good to go or freeze!
Works perfectly every time. I add s little food colouring to give it a bit of attraction too. Red or yellow! Good luck mate!
 
I have made pastes from boilies and also pellets.

Mill them down until there are a fine powder and then add enough to an beaten egg or two until the right consistency is achieved. The paste needs to be stiff enough to stay on during the cast and yet sticky enough to stick around the pellet/boilie/cork ball. With the correct consistency the paste should stay on, even during the retrieve. Very slowly it should wear down in the flow and draw fish onto the hook bait.

Wrap the paste in cling film to prevent it drying out and keep in the fridge. Paste from shelf life boilies lasts for months stored in the fridge due to the preservatives in the boilies. However, paste from pellets lasts only a week or two in the fridge before mould appears so keep it in the freezer if you need to store it for longer.

I will try the addition of fishmeal and ground hemp and maybe spices before to long!

Paste from sausage meat was a favourite when I was a lad. Stiffen with crumb or corn flour as mentioned in the thread. Might have to try it again before too long!

Stephen
 
Conrad,

Interesting, sounds very similar to my chub bait from a few years back, only I used plenty of hemp oil, plenty of BPEO and some garlic powder IIRC..

I can't remember the exact amounts off the top of my head, but it was something like 40ml hemp oil and 40drops BPEO and 2 tsp garlic, per 2 egg mix, I forget now. Subtle it wasn't!

Got the idea from an Archie Braddock chub article in Coarse Angling Today.

It caught me some good chub on the Teme, as well as one or two surprise barbel in the conditions.

Good times!
 
guys - if they ain't up for it they won't have whatever you throw at 'em - drops of bpeo streuth! find the fish-feed them some simple food - they eat it simples! I am sure simple baits catch as much as oil/amino/bpeo baits if you tried them. I tried this once with an angler that swore by the 'new' pellet baits. Remember those days? Well I fished plain spam on the wharfe and outfished him 3 to 1 - is he still on here?
 
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