Just before the New Year, here's an appetizing puzzle: How many cheese toppings can you load up on one pizza? Take a chair and maybe an anti-heartburn pill because the answer may surprise you.
1001. Yes, that's the number of different cheese toppings on the pizza that broke a Guinness World Record and was declared to be the pizza with the most cheese toppings ever in the world.
1001 different types of cheese decorated the pizza created by chefs Benoît Bruel and Fabien Montellanico with the help of cheesemaker Sophie Hatat Richart-Luna and YouTuber Florian OnAir. The pizza broke the previous record for the pizza with the most cheese toppings - a record of 834 types of cheese set in 2021 by Morgan Niquet.
Pizza topped with 1,001 types of cheese earns Guinness World Record https://t.co/8bouUniPaL pic.twitter.com/1izyuz6BjU
— New York Post (@nypost) December 30, 2023
In case you were wondering about the distribution of cheeses on the pizza - 940 of the cheeses that found themselves on the pizza were French cheeses and 61 were cheeses from around the world. How do you make a pizza that can contain 1001 cheese toppings? In small portions. Each cheese was cut into a 2-gram cube and placed on the base of the pizza dough. The soft cheeses were placed on top of the harder cheeses.
"We baked the pizza dough in advance," Bruel said, explaining that it was done "so that it wouldn't tear from the cheeses that were placed on it." He said a baking ring was placed around the cheese pile to hold the construction while the cheeses were baked. After two minutes, the ring was removed and the pizza was put back in the oven for another twenty seconds before being taken out ready to eat.
For Boral, this is breaking his own record, having in 2020 been behind baking a pizza with "only" 254 cheese toppings. He managed to break the record after spending five months searching for different types of cheese.
Bruel's efforts paid off, earning him another title in the Guinness Book of World Records, in the category of the largest cheese exhibit.
"It was a real mission, to spend time on farms with cheese producers who have such a passion for the profession," he told the official Guinness World Records website. He also revealed that many of the cheese makers and farmers he met with asked to give him their cheeses for free, because they liked the idea of taking part in breaking a Guinness World Record.
Although this is the record-breaking second time for Bruel, the French pizza baker is not going to rest. "I've been baking pizza for 13 years. I invented my own pizza recipes, and since I started my own business, my only dream is to bake pizzas with the most variety of cheeses," he says.
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