One of my recipes for when you want to go plastic free. An easy gummy bear recipe that has been adapted for a fishing lure. Food grade materials means there little impact on the environment when you use these soft jelly worms.
The basic recipe is simple – it’s equal parts vegetable glycerine, beef gelatine and warm water. Mix them well and heat in the microwave until all the gelatine has dissolved. It normally takes 3 or 4 blasts of 20 seconds, stirring in between each heat. Don’t boil as this will bring in lots of air and affects the sinking of the worm.
Once you’ve got your base mixture it’s simply a case of adding some food colouring for visual impact and flavouring for smell and taste. I opted for a dash of blue food colour in this recipe and half a teaspoon of black lugworm bait additive.
Pour the mixture into the moulds and put in fridge for about 1 hour. turn out and leave a few hours to firm up and dry.
I bought a simple silicon worm mould from amazon for about £8 with 20 worms. The mixture of 1 tablespoon of glycerine, gelatine and water will fill most of these moulds. This makes it a quick and cheap mixture to make when you can not get your hands on live bait.
I’ve stored these for over 1 month in a airtight plastic food container at room temperature without any breakdown in the worms.
I’ve also used larger commercial top-pour fishing lure molds to make soft paddle tail lures but these have yet to be fully tested.
In the video I used some black lugworm flavour and tested it on the tidal Usk to good effect. Another good recipe for sea fishing is to replace the warm water with oyster sauce.
I’ve not yet tested these gummy worm baits in freshwater but that is on my list to do.
If you want to avoid using soft plastic fishing lures and opt for something a bit more environment friendly then this recipe is a great option as a bioplastic recipe. Just remember they are not as robust as soft plastic worms, after all a soft plastic lure will take 200 years to degrade while these gummy worms take just a couple of days to disappear if they fall off the hook.
Expect them to last as long as live bait and it’s best to treat these gummy worms as a convenient alternative to live bait rather than a replacement for plastic lures.
