One of the questions I receive most often is about the speed of action of the bait and I am usually asked how to speed it up.
Like: "I'm happy with my boilies, I just wish they were faster and the water would come in quicker".
We have seen in one of the previous pills how the speed of action is linked to the ability of the active and attractive ingredients to come out of the bait, not so much to the speed at which the water breaks up the boilie and turns it into mush (which is interesting for many carp anglers).
The answer focuses on either changing the subtle mechanical balance of the mix or substantially changing the liquid component of the bait itself. In reality, there is a much faster solution that allows us to increase both the specific attractiveness and the dissolving time in one go, while perfectly respecting the starting recipe of the boilie.
This solution comes from the distant past, when baits did not necessarily have to be spherical to be called boilies!
This production process allows us to make many baits that are very reactive in the water without having to use tools such as a rolling table or even an extruder. Before going any further, let's say that the major limitation of this type of bait is that it cannot be thrown at great distances due to its aerodynamic shape (the sphere is the best solid from this point of view), but this factor is irrelevant for those who bait from the boat or near the shore.
these are the cubic or cylindrical baits cut with a knife after cooking.
this process involves rolling out the dough in blocks a few centimetres thick, using a simple tool such as a rolling pin and perhaps using two thick jigs to do the job quickly.
I had screwed to the work table two parallel boards 2 cm high and placed at a distance from each other of a few centimeters less than the length of the rolling pin. In this way I spread the dough roughly between the two boards and then I rolled the rolling pin until the dough was spread to a homogeneous thickness.
I then cut it into parallelepipeds of about 2 X 10 X 10 centimetres in size and cooked by boiling, covering the rolls with cling film so that they would not come into direct contact with the boiling water, thus keeping all the water-soluble ingredients intact. Or I would place them in baskets and steam them directly (at a later date).
Once the buns had cooled down, I cut them into 2 x 2 x 2 cubes with a sharp knife and I had many cubes with no surface crust and therefore no barrier to the entry or exit of liquids.
As a matter of fact a spherical boilie is completely covered by a thin superficial crust given by the gelatinized starches that in cooking tend to come to the surface and however little this barrier slows down a lot the exchange in water at least in the first 2 hours of immersion (if the mix is well done).
The cube, on the other hand, has at least 4 raw sides, from the cut side, which do not offer any barrier, allowing the cube to be consumed in half the time of a sphere of equal volume.
Another system involved extruding the sausages and arranging them concentrically on the baskets (like a large spiral), leaving openings through which the steam could filter and pass between the baskets.
At the end of cooking, after letting it cool, I cut the sausages into cylinders and these had the two sides of the raw cut on a par with the cube, thus consuming themselves in 1/3 less time than the sphere of equal volume.
Cubes can be baited in the same way as boilies, they just need a hair rig that is a few millimetres longer, or more dynamic D rig terminals.
You can, however, choose to bait a normal round bait made from the same mix and ingredients as the cubes and use the cubes solely as a side bait.
In the book Boilies you will find many recipes for quick and also soluble boilies.