Making Boilies; Step by Step

1. Ingredients; Eggs, Breadcrumbs, Soya Flour, Plain Flour, Fresh Calf Liver, Red Food Dye, Semolina and Sugar. Crushed Dried Cat Pellets were also added though not photographed. The Calf Liver may seem suprising but Carp and in particular Tench are well known to be hugely attracted to Oxblood and Liver. Oxblood is regarded as the top Tench attractant when added to ground bait.

2. Wet Mix; I beat the five eggs first with the sugar, then added the partially liquidised liver, semolina and a few drops of red food colouring.

3. Dry Mix; Next, in a seperate bowl, I mixed the Plain and Soya Flour, before adding the breadcrumbs and crushed dry cat food.

4. Forming the Dough; The dry mix is added to the wet mix gradually a couple of table spoons at a time. I found as more dry mix was added it became hard work the mixture as it becomes very heavy and rather sticky. Good idea to do this when your girlfriend is far away from home as it is really messy and the kitchen was in bits in no time, not to mention me being covered in flour from head to toe! I had to make up more dry mix as I did not have enough to get the dough to a dry consistence where it could be kneaded easily. A lot of thorough mixing was needed but in the end a really nice dough did result.

5. Rolling the Boilies; Found the best way by far to do this was to roll the dough into long sausages and cut them with scissors before rolling them individually. Rolled the sausages into different diameters to get various sizes of boilie.

6. Preboiled Boilies; At this point transfered them to a sieve. Quickly became apparent that too many together would result in them sticking together, so boiled about 25 at a time.

7. Boiling; Really simple, just threw them into a pot of boiling water for about two minutes. They sink at first but pop to the top after 90 seconds or so and I removed them with a ladle and strained them over the pot with the sieve. The egg in the mix comes into its own here and seals the boiles in a thin skin. The longer they are left in the tougher they become.

8. Drying; After draining them, the boilies are placed on towel of news paper and left to dry out on a level surface over night. This is how they looked a day later.

All in all it took me about two hours for the whole process, which was really fairly simple. There is no real limit to the flavours and experiments you could carry out making these baits.

Boilies freeze well and can be used for weeks fresh. After adding liver I decided the best thing to do was freeze them in portions of 20 baits in small freezer bags. The batch I made produced about 400 baits which is probably enough for the rest of the season! Have kept a few in the fridge and am looking forward to trying them out at Drevviken later this week, will be a great buzz to get any good fish on these homemade baits. Hoping that Tench will find them to their taste and am really curious as to results with other species as well, in particular large Rudd and Bream. In theory these baits are able to withstand the attention of smaller fish for long periods due to the tough skin, while being very attractive to larger fish which have no problems taking these baits. So goes the theory! Will have to wait and see how things pan out...