As records go, an Italian baguette baked during the Milan Expo 2015 World Fair bagged the title as the longest baguette in the world from Guinness World Records. This broke the previous 111-meter (364-foot) record of the Big C Supercenter, a supermarket in Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
As reported on the Expo site, the collaborating team had 27 Italian and seven French bakers preparing the dough for the122.4-meter baguette.
The bid for the record was supported by Ferrero, the Italian maker of Nutella. This initiative was aimed not just at celebrating traditional bread-making but also to highlight the closeness of Italy and France in the culture of food and of friendhship.
Yahoo News reports that the 400-foot carb wonder was baked for nearly seven hours at 66 feet (20 meters) per hour where the bakers' main challenge was avoiding any breakage to the bread. This was compounded by having to cope with the conditions of having to work outdoors. The bakers used a specially designed portable oven throughout the length of the dough.
Dominique Anract, participating baker and owner of the Parisian bakery La Pompadour explained that the difficulty of working with an outdoor temperature is how the cold affects the dough. The bakers trumped this challenge by covering the dough with plastic.
The baguette's characteristic soft interior and crusty exterior was achieved by the bakers perfectly. Once certification was handed down, the baguette was smeared with Nutella and divided among the hundreds of Expo visitors and participants to celebrate the win.
This is just one more of the Guinness World Records wins in the Expo this year, which included the record for the world's longest pizza in mid-2015. According to The Independent, the pizza was a collaboration of 60 chefs and measured almost a mile long. It made use of 1.5 tonnes of mozzarella cheese combined with two tones of tomato sauce. The record-breaking pizza weighed 5 tons and was 1.59545 km long.
