World's Largest Pancake Griddle

In September 1987 the village of Penn Yan cooked a buckwheat pancake 28 feet across, and the griddle that held it still hangs on the wall of the mill. The Birkett Mills, at 1 East Main Street, says it has milled specialty grains in the Finger Lakes since 1797. It dates today's mill to 1824, after the previous building burned in 1823.

The pancake was made on 27 September 1987 at the village's Buckwheat Harvest Festival. According to Mountain Home magazine in 2024, it was one inch thick and was cooked on a specially built two-part griddle, flipped with a construction crane and served to 7,000 people; the magazine puts attendance that year at 30,000 over several days. The mill says the effort set a Guinness Book of World Records mark for the largest pancake ever made, a record since bested. WorldAtlas, writing in 2026, says it stood for years before a town in Rochdale, England, took it in 1994.