The Pie That Needed a Fire Truck to Cool Down

In September 2010, a crowd gathered at the New Bremen Pumpkinfest in Ohio to watch a scale. On it sat a pumpkin pie weighing 3,699 pounds, and it was still warm.

The pie measured 20 feet across, and Guinness World Records still lists it as the largest ever made. The crust alone took 440 sheets of dough, and nine area chefs were behind the project.

The filling list reads like a warehouse order: 187 No. 10 cans of pumpkin pie filling and 233 dozen eggs, or 2,796 in all. Add 109 gallons of evaporated milk and 525 pounds of sugar.

No home oven could hold that, so the team built one. It was a closed convection oven made from foundation blocks, and a Springfield firm, Arctech Fabricating, fabricated the giant pie pan.

The bake was planned for 12 to 15 hours across September 24 and 25, and reports say it ran over 13. Partway through, the team decided the filling needed longer, so the pie was pushed back into the oven.

A pie that size has a physics problem, because a filling this thick can fail to set in the middle. The pan's frame was meant to work like a giant radiator, with a local fire department planning to hook up a truck and circulate cooling water.

The town was topping itself. Its 2005 record pie was 12 feet across and 2,020 pounds, so the 2010 pie was 1,679 pounds heavier. A Shelby County weights and measures official certified the final number.