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All that remains of 1987 World’s Largest Cherry Pie can be seen in Traverse City

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All that remains of 1987 World’s Largest Cherry Pie can be seen in Traverse City

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Often called the “cherry capital of the world,” Traverse City is home to more cherry-related world records than you might think.

On July 25, 1987, the same year as the state of Michigan’s 150th birthday, Chef Pierre bakery — now a part of the Sarah Lee Corp. — sought to break a record for the world’s largest cherry pie during the 62nd Traverse City Cherry Festival.

Neighboring city Charlevoix held the record for a 7-ton, 14-foot-long cherry pie baked in 1976, but in 1987, Traverse City bakers had a record number of cherries, the biggest crop at the time since 1965, and fruitful ambitions.

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The record pie was a community effort to say the least, after 47 companies and organizations donated hundreds of dollars each to fund the efforts. Local steel companies also designed, fabricated and constructed a stainless-steel pie pan 17 feet and 6 inches across and 26 inches deep, as well as a 24-feet-wide, 6-feet-high circular oven with a lid and 12-inch-thick walls to bake the pie with the power of 300 household ovens.

The oven was built on the Open Space festival grounds two days prior to the attempt, and two pieces of the pie plate were moved to the grounds to be welded together the day before the event.

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The recipe for a record-breaking cherry pie is as follows, at a scale estimated to be about 14,000 times the size of an average cherry pie:

For the filling:

  • About 2.5 million cherries, weighing 8,895 pounds,
  • 7,478 pounds of sugar,
  • 966 pounds of flour,
  • 855 pounds of corn starch,
  • 1.17 pounds of vegetable oil,
  • and 45 pounds of salt.

And for the crust:

  • 1,081 pounds of flour,
  • 703 pounds of shortening,
  • 226 pounds of water,
  • 32 pounds of salt,
  • and 54 pounds of dextrose.

Make your own cherry treats this year: Recipe: Cherry cornbread muffins make a hearty breakfast (freep.com)

Early in the morning on July 25, Chef Pierre bakers mixed the ingredients for the pie crust dough in 400-pound batches before transporting them to the Open Space, rolling them the dough out into 18-inch-wide strips and piecing them together in the pie pan for a bottom crust. The top crust was put together the same way.

The cherry filling followed a similar method, being mixed in 200-gallon batches, to be divvied out and transported in 5-gallon buckets, and finally dumped into the assembled pie crust one-by-one.

Once the pieces of the pie were all put together, a 35-ton crane was used to carefully lift the pie 9 feet above the ground and place it securely inside the oven and seal it with a lid. The behemoth pie cooked at an average temperature between 375 and 425 degrees for almost two hours before being removed from the oven at 12:15 p.m.

The pie was weighed on a highway truck scale provided by the state police, where it clocked in at about 28,350 pounds — successfully breaking the Guinness world record for the world’s largest cherry pie.

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Festival Cherry Queen Cindy Pleva cut the pie with a 6-foot-long knife, which currently sits in the National Cherry Festival office. Then from about 1:45 p.m. to 10 p.m., 75,000 7-ounce servings of cherry pie were vacuumed out of the tin with a tube, topped with pastry crumbs and served to about 35,000 festivalgoers.

After the pie was devoured and the pan was cleaned spick-and-span, the nearly 18-foot pan was moved to the side of Cass Road in Traverse City, where it currently sits upright alongside a sign to memorialize the world record.

Traverse City remained home of the world’s largest cherry pie until July 14, 1990, when members of the Oliver Rotary Club in British Columbia, Canada, baked a 37,721-pound cherry pie. However, Oliver ditched the tin after decimating their 17-ton pie, leaving Traverse City as the continual titleholder for “home of the world’s largest cherry pie tin.”

The 98th National Cherry Festival in Traverse City runs this year from Saturday, June 29, to Saturday, July 6. Find more information here.

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