Pizza Hut attempts to set record for world’s biggest pizza | CNN

CNN
 — 

When Pizza Hut decided to bring back its “big New Yorker” pizza – a cheese and pepperoni pie with foldable slices designed to be eaten on the go in true Manhattan style – the company wanted to find a way to celebrate the news.

Its idea? Take New York to Los Angeles.

Specifically, the Los Angeles Convention Center, whose space would be big enough to hold a 14,001-square-foot (3,809 square meters) pizza that would break the Guinness world record for the world’s biggest pizza.

To complete the task, workers put down layers of dough first, tomato sauce is painted on, then toppings are added. Once everything is set, enormous heat lamps cook the pizza.

In total, 13,653 pounds (6,193 kilograms) of dough, 4,948 pounds of pizza sauce, more than 8,800 pounds of cheese and roughly 630,496 pieces of pepperoni went into making the record-breaking pie.

Pizza Hut’s CEO, David Graves, told Reuters that the pizza will not go to waste – as soon as the pizza is done and documented for Guinness, its 68,000 slices will be donated to local food banks.

“We were the first to deliver a pizza. We’re the first to take an order over the Internet.” Graves said. “We’ve always done big, exciting things. And so, breaking the world record for the world’s largest pizza just felt like the right thing to do to celebrate bringing back our largest pizza,” Graves said.

The previous Guinness record for the world’s largest pizza was set in 2012 by a group of Italian chefs. Their pizza was 1,261.65 square meters, gluten-free, and given the name Ottavia.

Top image credit: Mike Blake/REUTERS