Wenatchee Apple Pie Takes Shape Hundreds Peel, Roll, Bake For Place In Guinness Book

For a community claiming to be the world’s “Apple Capital,” not holding the record for the largest apple pie on the planet has been a little hard to swallow.

Saturday, residents of Wenatchee attempted to greatly expand the city’s dessert menu. Hundreds of volunteers worked to make a 40,000-pound apple pie that can make it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Volunteers sliced 32,000 pounds of the region’s famous fruit to fill a 44-foot by 24-foot pie tin. The pie also needed 3,175 pounds of flour, 3,500 pounds of sugar and 100 pounds of cinnamon.

Pauline Sweeney, pie-baking coordinator from the North Central Washington Museum, has been camped out at Walla Walla Point Park along the Columbia River monitoring the construction of the propane-powered, steel-girded convection oven being custom made for the title attempt.

“Nothing you can say, can keep me away, from my pie,” Sweeney joked as welders put the finishing touches on the steel dome to cover the massive pie plate. “We have so many people who are donating their time for this effort, that’s how you bake a pie this big - with the help of the entire community.”

The lid of the convection oven was lifted by crane over the pie plate, and the pie baked some seven hours. At 5 p.m. an official weighing, measuring and tasting ceremony took place, Sweeney said.

“The pie has to be edible to make it into the Guinness Book,” Sweeney said. “We’re going to serve it up with a shovel and we hope the community comes out and tastes the fruit of our labor.”

Wenatchee has baked the world’s largest apple pie once before. In 1938, more than 2,000 people turned out to see a 2,200-pound apple pie assembled in Memorial Park.

The world record was set in 1982 by Chef Glynn Christian of Hewitts Farm in Chelsfield, England, who baked an apple pie that weighed 30,000 pounds and was 40 feet wide.