Ruston and the Giant Peach (Cobbler)

Ruston, Louisiana is a thriving and vibrant college community in northern Louisiana. The town boasts having two fine universities: Louisiana Tech and Grambling. In addition to a great quality of life there, one of the local delights is the Ruston Peach. Each year, the community celebrates its exquisite fruit with a big festival.

In 2014, General Manager Ronnie Rawls and Director of Sales Brandon Sutherland had an idea for the record books. The Guinness Book of World Records to be precise. They approached Integral’s Tina Johnson with their big idea of wanting to bake the world’s largest peach cobbler.

To do that would take an 8 foot by 16 foot baking pan. Ingredients would include over 800 pounds of peaches, nearly 350 pounds of flour, 73 gallons of milk, more than 300 pounds of butter and 451 pounds of sugar. The final product, weighing in at approximately 2,251 pounds, would feed 6,000 at the 65th Annual Louisiana Peach Festival in June.

Tina immediately embraced the idea and the race was on to engineer the baking process and get Guinness to certify the record. Louisiana Tech’s Home Economics Department advised the team on building the oven, which required over 300 cinder blocks, 200 fire bricks and 3 double jet gas cookers. They also helped scale the spectacular recipe.

Ingredient prep began at 11 p.m. the night before, requiring the use of four 32 gallon trash cans, four 5 gallon buckets, four shovels and a cement mixer. After a cook time of 6 hours, the final result was a pie and pan that weighed more than a Toyota Tacoma and boasted over 2.9 million calories of sweet goodness.

When it was all said and done on Saturday, June 27, 2015, the Giant Peach Cobbler was officially certified by Guinness as the World’s Largest Fruit Cobbler.