SPEAKING OF ODD BAITS, TRY MY GLUTINOUS PASTE

I EXPERIMENTED a few years ago with home-made pastes based around a gluten mix. These were largely shunned by anglers, I believe because they tried them in summer when ‘melting’ pastes work better.

I used pea-sized pieces of gluten paste, coloured with vegetable dye. The ‘secret’ was the base mix... instant mashed potato!

It absorbs any flavour or colour well – Marmite is terrific in winter. The trick when using gluten is not to over-knead it, so make sure you mix the colour and flavour into the potato/water mix before adding the gluten and ‘folding’ it in. The gluten then forms long strings that help super-soft baits stay on the hook.

Two teaspoons of gluten powder to 8oz of dry potato was about right. Unlike cheese, the paste won’t harden in the cold and fluffs up beautifully, creating a flaky, irregular outline that leaks off a ‘haze’.

It costs very little to try it, and I recommend you do.

Weird baits work! See pages 22/23.