Custard Antenna

Some time ago, someone said of their ex-military antenna tuner “it would tune a bowl of custard if you asked it to” – this got me thinking, could I make my MFJ-971 antenna tuner literally tune a bowl of custard? I did attempt to put about 30-40W of RF into the antenna system (bowl of custard + ATU) however nothing was picked up on PSKReporter, leading me to conclude that the bowl of custard was significantly inferior on transmit compared to receive. The second experiment I would like to try, and the subject of the rest of this post, is to make a custard antenna that can at least vaguely usefully be used as an antenna.

Source: michaelcullen.name