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It's a record! Italian chefs make 5,836 pizzas in 12 hours

Catherine Edwards
Catherine Edwards - [email protected]
It's a record! Italian chefs make 5,836 pizzas in 12 hours
Photo: Che Pizza - Festa della Pizza

Hard-working pizza chefs cooked up a record-breaking 5,836 pizzas in around 12 hours in the southern region of Puglia.

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That's an impressive average of 550 pizzas an hour, or more than nine every minute.

The previous record of 5,070 - which had been set in Chiasso, Switzerland, in June 2015 by the Naples Academy of Pizza - was broken after ten hours and 23 minutes, and the Pugliese chefs went on to bake a further 766 delicious pies.

The record of pizza production was first established by employees of a Singaporean restaurant who made a total of 3,574, so the chefs will be pleased to bring the title back home.

It was a team effort of 43 pizza-makers, many from Italy's association of qualified pizza chefs, who gathered in Martina Franca, in Puglia, southern Italy. The record attempt was the finale of the town's three-day pizza-themed celebration at the weekend, which saw a total of 11,000 pizzas baked and eaten.

Not just any pie made the cut. A panel of pizza experts were on hand to assess the quality of the final products in order to meet the Guinness World Record standards. The experts measured the balls of dough and the diameter of the base, which had to be no less than 31cm.

In fact, almost seven percent of the finished pizzas were disqualified - 450 altogether.


Each pizza was carefully measured. Photo: Che Pizza - Festa della Pizza

But there's no need to worry about the rejected pizzas going to waste; along with those which met record standards, they were all handed out for free to passers-by, with many also given to local charities.

While no one would dispute that Italy is home to the best quality pizza, Italians also love to prove that they can beat the competition when it comes to quantity too - these weren't the first record-breaking pizzas to be baked in the country recently.

Last summer, pizza chefs and volunteers toiled for 16 hours in Rende in Calabria to produce a 1.229 kilometre pizza, smashing a record previously set by Spain. The team was delighted to bring the title back to the homeland of pizza, but the main motivation of the project was to raise money for a shuttle bus to help the town’s disabled and elderly residents get around.

However, they only held their crown for a few days, before an enormous 1,595.45 metre-long margherita pizza at the Milan Expo broke the newly-set record.

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