12 Maine Foods and Drinks Out-of-Staters Have Never Heard Of

Ask for an Italian in Maine, and you’ll get a sandwich with boiled ham and American cheese.

That surprises a lot of out-of-staters, and it’s not the only local food that does.

Here are the Maine foods and drinks out-of-staters have never heard of.

1. Ployes

Ployes are thin buckwheat pancakes, long considered a staple of the Acadian diet.

You typically roll a ploye up and eat it with your meal.

Fort Kent’s annual Ploye Festival is named for the pancake.

Organizers describe the festival’s giant ploye as the world’s largest.

As of 2022, the festival cooks its giant ploye on a 12-foot griddle over charcoal, with batter from about 50 pounds of ploye mix.

Chefs scrape the ploye off the griddle with shovel-sized spatulas.

They offer pieces to anyone who wants some, so you can try a bite.

2. Needhams

Needhams are a chocolate-covered candy made with mashed potato, shredded coconut, and sugar.

Candymaker John Seavey created them in Auburn, Maine, around 1872, when he added potatoes, an ingredient plentiful in the state.

A recipe from a Bangor Daily News food editor’s weekly column starts with three-quarters of a cup of plain mashed potatoes.

You mix in four cups each of confectioners’ sugar and shredded coconut, press the candy into a buttered pan, and pour melted chocolate on top.

Once the chocolate cools, you cut the candy into squares.

As the story goes, Seavey named the candy after George Needham, a popular evangelist preacher of the day.

3. Moxie

Maine’s Legislature made Moxie the official state soft drink in 2005.

The law describes it as a registered trademarked soft drink invented by Maine-born Dr. Augustin Thompson of Union, and says it symbolizes spirit and courage.

4. Italian Sandwiches

A Maine Italian sandwich has boiled ham and American cheese where you might expect Italian meats.

It isn’t just another sub.

Italian immigrant Giovanni Amato and his family first sold the sandwich to Portland dock workers as a lunch, more than a century ago.

Many shops add sour pickles, olives, tomatoes, green pepper, and onions, plus salt, pepper, and oil on a soft split-top roll.

A large Italian usually cost around $7 or $8 in early 2025.

As of early 2025, if you ordered a regular Italian at Amato’s, you got those same ingredients.

5. Allen’s Coffee Brandy

Allen’s Coffee Brandy sold 90,859 cases in Maine in 2019, ahead of the 71,471 cases of Tito’s Handmade Vodka.

That made it the state’s top seller by volume.

If you counted dollars instead of cases, it had slipped to third place at $9.2 million, behind Fireball and Tito’s.

If you compared 2014 with 2019, its sales revenue had dropped 16 percent.

A Norwood, Massachusetts, company makes the brandy.

Even so, the Portland Press Herald reported in 2020 that Maine was the only major market for it.

6. Black Oxford Apples

Black Oxford apples come from Paris, Maine, where the variety was discovered around 1790.

The fruit is a deep purple, nearly black.

Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners says genetic profiling traced the variety’s parents to Hunt Russet and Blue Pearmain.

A Black Oxford can be a little hard and firm right off the tree.

If you store the apples for a month, the fruit sweetens, and it gets better over winter.

If you bake, the variety makes excellent pies and sauce.

7. Fiddleheads

Fiddleheads from ostrich ferns are an iconic spring edible in Maine.

They’re the tightly coiled shoots of the ostrich fern, picked along riverbanks and streams in spring.

Pickers, retailers, and woodland owners earn extra income from them each spring.

When you pick them, leave a few fiddleheads on each plant to support future growth.

University of Maine Cooperative Extension publishes a fiddlehead fact sheet whose recipes it tested with the university’s School of Food and Agriculture.

Once they’re cooked, you can serve them right away with melted butter, vinegar, olive oil, salt, or pepper.

Cook fiddleheads in small batches so enough water or steam reaches them.

8. Wild Blueberry Pie

Blueberry pie is Maine’s official state dessert, but only when it’s made with wild Maine blueberries, a rule that lawmakers added to state law in 2011.

The wild blueberry itself had been the official state berry since 1991.

If you’re baking a pie to match the law’s definition, you need wild Maine blueberries.

9. Red Snapper Hot Dogs

Red snapper hot dogs are beef-and-pork franks dyed bright red.

Bangor-based W.A. Bean & Sons is a red snapper brand, and the company has made hot dogs for more than a century.

Yankee says the name comes from their bright color and the snap of the natural casing.

Head farther south, and you may only find Kayem Reds, a red snapper-style hot dog made in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

10. B&M Brown Bread

B&M brown bread is a sweet canned bread made from cornmeal, wheat and rye flours, and molasses.

The B&M name comes from cofounders George Burnham and Charles Morrill.

Their company built a four-story canning factory in Portland, Maine, in 1913.

In 2021, that factory made canned brown bread alongside B&M’s baked beans.

B&M’s plant stayed in Portland until 2021.

You open both ends of the can and slide the bread out.

Slices are fine at room temperature, or you can warm them in a microwave or toaster oven.

In many New England households, baked beans and hot dogs with brown bread have been a Saturday night tradition.

11. Whoopie Pies

The whoopie pie is Maine's official state treat, thanks to a 2011 law.

The law defines a whoopie pie as a baked good made of two cakes with a creamy frosting between them.

So if you order a whoopie pie, you're getting cake, not pie.

12. Maple Syrup

Maine named pure maple syrup its official state sweetener in 2015.

Maine Maple Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of March.

If you visit that weekend, you'll find sugarhouses across the state open for boiling demonstrations, sugar woods tours, and pancake breakfasts.

In 2026, the 43rd annual weekend was March 21 and 22.