These days looking for cheap but well proven alternative big fish protein baits is very important and homemade sausage meat baits and ground baits are brilliant baits for so many reasons. Luncheon meats and Pepperoni are popular and effective but extremely expensive as fishing baits. So let's now see how to make your own big fish sausage meat baits and save yourself a fortune!



Using sausage meat is rather more ethical than basing your baits on very valuable marine resources, but you can use it to bulk-up certain fish or shellfish bait mixes to cut costs and create different nutritional profiles, tastes effects etc. you can easily get sausage meat fresh or frozen fresh and fresh is best although catfish are also renowned for loving baits just souring, but I would prefer to use this effect with blood based baits for instance and not pork. Often the biggest fish in your water will take a new safe bait pretty quickly and certainly sausage meat based baits are not trendy so can really give you many competitive edges!

Sausage meat is very simple and easy to use and you can either mince it up or use the minced product. The nutritional value of pork sausage meat is very stimulatory to both carp and catfish and has a fair proportion of those important fish stimulators; amino acids and oils. Pork sausage meat is often made with bread crumbs and it is very simple to make a bait by simply mixing it with eggs and very cheap wheat flour for example, although other more nutritional binding flours and meals are very numerous, to help bind bait into a dough.

Making one of the cheapest protein based homemade baits is simple, fast and very easy to do:

For example, using half a pound of minced sausage meat, mix it in a bowl with about 3 to 4 large hens eggs and around 2 table spoons of ordinary cheap wheat flour (or more if required) and kneed this into a stiff pliable dough. This can be used as fishing bait immediately as paste, or you can bag it up in bags with a tie to make the bag air tight and store in the fridge or freeze it for use next session. This bait is pretty much instant on most carp and catfish waters even though various meat brands and grades may very results and although very basic and simple will produce lots of fish.

Like the majority of carp and catfish baits, the best way to start fishing with it is to feed perhaps 2 to 6 pounds or more of it into your swim, in advance. (This is certainly not absolutely necessary however!) You might for instance, over a period of 3 days prior to fishing, start introducing paste pieces about an inch in diameter just by pulling them off your balls of dough you have made.

Introducing safe free baits is never a wasted exercise and in fact this is one of the most powerful methods of achieving big fish catches anyway. Many easy ground baits can be made from sausage meat too. Using paste on the hair or direct on the hook has been catching big carp and catfish for decades, and now is a great time to try it! Paste bait is really effective but if smaller fish are troublesome simply scald or par-boil your baits to make them more resistant and use paste on your rig too!

As most commercial rolled baits have uniform shapes, your homemade baits in odd shapes have the advantage over more wary fish by disrupting their reference points! Boilies are just made by placing your dough baits only a handful at a time in half a pan of boiling water in a pan for a couple of minutes; this makes a resilient skin when they dry-off on conveniently placed absorbent towels or trays etc. keep your water boiling at all times by not adding too many baits at once and keep taking baits out after around 2 minutes or so.

The proteins in the eggs in the boilies coagulate more with more boiling to make your baits harder, but you might add other substances to harden or toughen your baits; such as blood powder which also adds valuable stimulatory nutritional attraction. The choice of other additives, ingredients, flavours etc is vast, but choosing these is very much a science and art! Anything you add is better based on a little investigation of what truly triggers fish feeding and what has not already hammered your water, rather than a quick trip to the local bait shop first as this can end up costly and even counter-productive to your financial goals!

Really cheap homemade sausage baits might mirror Pepperoni products and you can add herbs and spices to improve attraction and stimulates fish digestion and general metabolism which is extremely valuable thing to do! You might simply add yeast powders, or Marmite or Vegemite to improve your stimulatory nutritional profile or use various matured cheeses which are rich in stimulatory salts and bacterially predigested proteins. Save money by adding a proportion of liquidised liver instead of more expensive liquid protein amino acids supplements for instance to boost nutritional stimulation.

The choice of ingredients, additives, flavours, taste enhancers etc not only bewildering for most anglers, but often expensive. It is a giant money-saving edge when you know what you are really adding for exactly what direct or indirect purpose in stimulating fish digestion, or to enhance responses at fish receptors and the brain to induce more intensive feeding for instance. Whatever you use, be it a bioactive flavour complex, or simple monosodium glutamate or anchovy source, often keeping things cheap will provide many hidden edges over anglers commercial baits which may already have peaked as it were...

If you use proven fish feeding triggers and proven fish attractors with a nutritional or other physiological beneficial effect then they will pay their worth for sure. Even supermarket oil based citrus flavours can be very effective not least due to being unique and containing beneficial bioflavonoids, acids etc, but you can make your own homemade flavoured oils, flavours and nutritional glugs, dips etc for very little expense anyway. Homemade sausage meat baits do compete even with the latest enzyme-active commercial baits and catch big carp and catfish at a fraction of the cost of very many popular baits. Being different is one of the top edges in fishing even simply using the bait ideas here to adapt add an unusual bait paste moulded round your readymade bait is going to get you thinking about more productive possibilities in the future; and the more you know the more valuable cheaper edges you have!

By Tim Richardson.