| Sap’s Running in Steuben |
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| Written by Letitia Baldwin | |
| Thursday, March 29, 2007 | |
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Maine Maple Sunday: How Sweet It Is STEUBEN — Jordan Godino caught his first sap flow of the season last week. For four days straight, the organic farmer collected a gallon of the sweet, sticky liquid daily from each of the 500 red maple trees tapped on the Goods Point Road property.  Hundreds of Mainers gather Sunday at Painted Pepper Farm to see how maple syrup is produced and to load up on various maple syrup products.— STAFF PHOTOS BY LETITIA BALDWIN In his four-wheeler, he brought 100 gallons of sap at a time back to the sugar house, where it slowly heated and condensed in a wood-fired evaporator before the hot, clear syrup was drawn off and poured into sterilized flasks and bottles. Then Godino, his wife, Lisa Reilich, and their daughters Ella, Maiah and Margaret, threw open the doors of their saltwater farm on Maine Maple Sunday and showed several hundred visitors how maple syrup is produced.  Steuben organic farmer Jordan Godino explains the process of making maple syrup in his sugar house. Standing in his steam-filled sugar house, Godino explained the process from first drilling holes and inserting taps into the red maples to the critical moment when the boiled-down sap achieves the right sugar concentration and becomes syrup. “The sap hadn’t flowed much until four days ago,” Godino said. “This has been the best run in my six years of farming.” Besides seeing maple syrup produced, visitors toured Painted Pepper Farm’s sugarbush and peered inside some of the five-gallon buckets hanging from trees. They also loaded up on freshly produced maple syrup, maple-roasted nuts, maple syrup cream and fudge, classic maple sugar candies and the award-winning yogurts. While maple syrup was the lure, Painted Pepper Farm’s newly born kid goats proved just as popular, especially for families with infants and children. Godino and Reilich raise Nigerian dwarf dairy goats as a source for their own household milk and to produce various organic goat’s milk products ranging from yogurt to garlic dill chevre. The couple’s yogurt, which comes in a variety of flavors including honey ginger and wild blueberry, took a first and third place at the 2006 American Dairy Goat Association competition and came in third at the 2006 American Cheese Society competition. Carrying baby Margaret in a sling, Lisa Reilich strolled around her farm patiently answering questions about her family’s certified organic goat herd to the origin of the farm’s name. Her husband, she related, had the idea of raising peppers and came up with the name before moving to Maine. But they discovered the Steuben area on their honeymoon and wound up buying their 43-acre property in 2000. “Jordan wanted to be a pepper breeder back in New York,” related Reilich. “Then we moved to the Coast of Maine where it takes a longer season to grow peppers. But the name stuck.” |
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