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Who wants a 4-cheese pizza when you can opt for a 1001 cheese pizza? It may seem impossible, but a few months ago some pizzaiolos from Lyon beat the Guinness World Record for the pizza with the largest variety of cheeses in the world. As if it were a tribute to the tale of The Thousand and One Nights, French chefs Benoît Bruel and Fabien Montellanico made a pizza with this large number of types of cheese. Unsurprisingly, it beat the previous record, which stood at 834.
Benoît Bruel is the owner of the Déliss Pizza pizzeria in Lyon and by 2020 he had already succeeded in preparing a dough with 254 different cheeses. But he wanted to go one step further and teamed up with Fabien Montellanico to create a pizza 30 cm in diameter and put more than a thousand cheeses on it as toppings. In order to count as a type of cheese, they had to add a minimum of 2 grams of each variety.
940 of these cheeses were French
The pizzaiolo toured numerous cheese dairies and cheese farms in the region to collect so many varieties of cheeses. In fact, of the total number, 940 cheeses originated in France, many from regions such as Savoie, Isère and Ain, the Côte d’Or, the Var, the Dordogne and the Pyrenees. “I only wanted farmhouse cheeses, nothing that could come from industrial dairies,” he told France Info in an interview.
He also made room for his favorite cheeses, which are Secret de Compostelle, Le Montmayer and Broucaou. But among this long list he also included others such as Pain de Vandadour, Fontina d’alpage, Tynjetaler, Capri Torcéen, Astier ferme, Agasse du Lazac, Le Pitchanet, Prunelle fermière, Coeur des chintres, Pied de caveau, or Tendresse d’Alban. To achieve this feat, Benoît and Fabien were assisted by cheesemaker Sophie Hatat Richart-Luna and YouTuber Florian OnAir.
With such a large number of cheeses, Benoît revealed that they had to precook the pizza dough “to prevent it from breaking under the weight of all that cheese.” In addition, so that the cheeses would not spread during cooking, they put in a tata mold to hold all the ingredients together.
Would you be able to distinguish the 1001 different cheeses in this Guinness record pizza?