In Georgia, the peach is iconic: It’s on license plates, lottery tickets, beer cans, “I voted” stickers, and billboards.

And in the Peach State, Fort Valley is the peach capital and the site of Peach County’s annual festival, offering food trucks, beauty queens, games, live music, and large crates of ripe fruit. But the peach cobbler—baking in an 11- by five-foot pan—is the main event.

To make it, “you have to be more than a chef. You have to be an engineer,” says this year’s head chef-engineer, Rich Bennett. The massive dessert requires a custom-built oven, and Bennett says it goes in at 3 a.m. and cooks until about two in the afternoon.

Few places have the generational love of a single