CLO – Making Your Own Super Ingredient

CLO is basically egg bird food, bread crumb with added seed and cod liver oil. Pretty boring and blasé, but it doesn’t have to be… I’ve found that the addition of a good CLO aids in the rolling, helps with binding, gives texture, aids in leakage of your attracters and has vitamins ,minerals and aminos and with a bit of thought can be an attractor in its own right. I used to buy mine all the time and in the end I thought to myself that this one ingredient could be so much better. More attractive so to speak. I wanted an ingredient that held a better all-round package, something that I could use in a fish, milk, or bird food bait. I’ve seen different versions of CLO in the tackle shops and quite frankly, some are rubbish, often resembling pure white bread crumb with 5 or 6 Niger seeds shoved in the bag. Home made CLO can be custom made as you like, what I mean is you can make CLO for R300 per kilo or R50 per kilo. It can also be tailored to a specific bait and/or base mix. What I’ve been doing is using different seeds to get different levels of certain amino acids; for example if I want a higher level of lysine then I add buck wheat, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. Hemp, linseed, sorghum, rape, pumpkin and aniseed seeds to name but a few all offer different levels of aminos and vitamins. Dried fruits can be used as well, which would also bring a further dimension to the finished bait. Certain dried fruits are very high in vitamin C (ascorbic acid), for example cranberries and goji berries. All dried fruit can be blitsed up and added, herbs such as thyme, spices such as black pepper, 5 spice and chilli can all be experimented with. So with a few minutes research on the Internet you can have your own CLO which is custom made for your own requirements. Now, every ingredient in your mix is there for a purpose, and there’s only so much space available in a kilogram of mix (1000gr). I want an ingredient that offers quite a few different levels of attraction, both gustatory and olfactory, and also have a bit of binding and leakage qualities. So with that in mind its best to mix your CLO in kilo batches. That way you can add the amino profile of your separate ingredients to your bait calculator, which will tell you precisely what’s going on - there’s no place for guesswork! All the info about the amino acid levels of different ingredients is available on the Internet. Sites like Nutridata and the like provide all the nutritional information on all ingredients. THE MIX50gr linseed seed175gr hempseed125gr sunflower seed50gr Niger seed 40gr buckwheat 250gr EBF (cede, available at most birding shops)200gr white or brown breadcrumb10gr spice of your choice - can be chilli, fenugreek, black pepper50gr dried cranberries/blueberries /gojiberries50ml honey/pure maple syrup50ml cod liver oil Blitz all the seeds to a medium powder, excepting the niger seed that I leave as is. I blitz half of the EBF seed and leave the other half as is. If the dried berries are being difficult in the blitzer you can freeze them prior to blitzing. This way the natural sugars aren’t activated and won’t stick together in a gloopy ball. Then I mix all the dry ingredients together thoroughly, then add the cod liver oil, mix again and lastly add the honey. When you add the honey I find that you really have to rub the CLO in your hands to get all the ingredients mixed together. A flattish bowl is easier to use than a bucket at this stage. Once all the ingredients are mixed you can store the finished CLO in a sealable bucket in the deep freeze or fridge. I’ve used this CLO at levels ranging from 100gr to 200gr per kilo of base mix. Remember though that this is just one ingredient in your base mix, NOT the final mix. This is not a “cast in stone” recipe - all the seeds can be changed to suit your angling conditions, levels can be varied, and spices can be changed. It’s an idea that is constantly evolving that can be adapted and/or adjusted to your own fishing situations. It can be darkened, lightened, made more soluble, pH changers can be added, different egg bird food can be used and essential oils or oleoresins can be added. For me CLO is an ingredient that can make all the difference to a base mix, especially when a bit of thought and care is put into it. You can have a fully customised ingredient that is making the difference that no one else will have. Semi-tight lines and I might see you on the bank.