Ploye Festival a lively hit in Fort Kent

FORT KENT – The town’s annual Ploye Festival is all about having fun, creating and eating ployes and bringing people together to celebrate.

That’s what folks did Friday and Saturday in conjunction with the third annual International Muskie Derby in the St. John Valley community along the St. John River in northern Maine.

Ployes – a traditional staple of French and Acadian homes that once graced tables throughout the St. John Valley – were served at several outlets on Main Street during the weekend. The event also featured ploye-eating contests and the annual Bouchard family creation of the world’s largest ploye.

Yellow lapel buttons worn by hundreds of people proclaimed Fort Kent the home of the world’s largest ploye, 12 feet and 4 inches in diameter.

A ploye, thin and pancakelike, is made with a mixture of buckwheat and white flour. Cooked on one side only, it is eaten in place of bread. Its flavor can be enhanced with toppings of butter, peanut butter, a meat pate called “creton,” brown sugar, jams, jellies or syrup.

The Bouchard family – headed by Joey Bouchard, who took over the Alban Bouchard farm in Fort Kent – created the world’s largest ploye five years ago, beating a record of 11 feet that had been cooked up in Edmundston, New Brunswick. The Bouchard record has not been topped since.

The ploye was cooked in a Main Street parking lot Friday night, attracting some 500 onlookers. The cooking sheet was made of welded aluminum plates, though ployes usually are cooked on cast-iron skillets.

Joey Bouchard’s crew, numbering at least a dozen people, mixed 20 gallons of batter using 60 pounds of ploye mix from their farm. They used 25 bags of charcoal to heat the metal sheets.

“You need to get the sheet to 600 degrees,” Bouchard said as workers started moving the charcoal mound around. “Once the batter is laid on, the thin sheet cools quickly.”

It took four men to move the “skillet” over the grayed charcoal.

“You need 400 degrees to cook the ploye,” he said. “It all has to be done quickly once the batter is laid on.”

Four people dumped the batter onto the sheet and four others, using long-handled squeegees, smoothed out the batter to make the one-fourth-inch-thick pancake. In minutes the batter was cooking, creating the yellowish green pancake.

In a short time, to the cheering and applause of the appreciative crowd, the men moved the skillet away from the fire when the cooking was done.

They used 2-foot-long by 1-foot-wide spatulas to remove the cooked ploye that was served to the spectators.

Earlier Friday night, people of all ages – from 2 to adults – took part in a ploye-eating contest in the parking lot of Rock’s Restaurant. Carson Theriault of Fort Kent won the under 4-year-old competition, eating 3.5 ployes in two minutes.

The big winners of the eating contest, from Rhode Island, were almost six times faster.

Steve Trezvant ate 18 of the 5- to 6-inch-diameter ployes in two minutes, and his teammate Rob Littlefield ate 15.

The two Rhode Islanders, part of a cross-country running team, were in Fort Kent for a week of training.

At about the same time Friday, scores of people fanned out across the international bridge between Fort Kent and Clair, New Brunswick, laying ployes side by side to see how many it would take to span the river between the two countries.

“It took 1,609 ployes to connect the two sides of the international border,” said Suzie Paradis, one of the Ploye Festival volunteers.

At other places on Main Street, festival-goers could sit and eat the ployes at stands manned by members of several service organizations, who also offered chicken stew and chili to go with the delicacy.

The weekend also featured a Main Street craft fair, street dances in the evening, ploye-tasting stands at local restaurants, activities and a movie matinee for children on Saturday and a karaoke contest.