The Story Of The Record-Breaking 13,580.28 Foot Pizza

It might sound cheesy, but somebody had to bake the biggest pizza on the planet. Then, in record-breaking spirit, somebody else had to come along and bake an even bigger one, and so on. This is the way that culinary competition has been setting the pace for modern-day kitchens, according to Food and Wine, which states that a massive pepperoni pie was recently crowned "largest pizza in the world" by Guinness with record speed.

Measuring at a whopping 13,580.28 square feet, this pie takes the cake for being the largest pizza ever baked, or rather, broiled (via CNN). The New York Post reports that with almost 14,000 square feet of oozing cheese, the dish is quite literally the size of the arena it was cooked in. While this may be the latest and largest masterpiece coming hot out of the oven, that crown has been passed down through a long line of extraordinarily large pizzas, each with a unique twist (per Guinness World Records). From conception to assembly to distribution, here's the story of the record-breaking pizza pie.

While the previous record-holding pizza was baked by chefs in Italy using a puzzle-style approach — meaning they baked multiple sections of it at a time and then pieced them all together (via Guinness World Records) — this latest attempt comes directly from Pizza Hut (per CNN). Who better to set the largest pizza record than the nostalgic corporate giant that brought us those strangely textured red glasses and matching red checkered chandeliers hovering over pizza buffets in the '90s?

With a bit of help from popular YouTuber Airrack, alternatively Eric Decker, the pie was conceived and designed. According to the New York Post, it is a classic New York-style pizza, meaning it was crafted to be not just large, but also foldable. It features a jaw-dropping 8,800 pounds of cheese sprinkled atop 3,653 pounds of dough with a layer of marinara sauce positioned in between. The sauce alone weighs 4,948 pounds. The pizza was then topped with precisely 630,496 slices of pepperoni.

People reports that the New York-style pizza was actually made in Los Angeles. This is because baking the world's largest pie required an arena instead of an oven, according to the New York Post. To complete the task, a crew of workers gathered the full length of the Los Angeles Convention Center and began building the pizza from top to bottom, rolling out dough, slathering on the sauce, and sprinkling cheese and toppings (via People).

As you might imagine, it was impossible to bake a pie this big, but Pizza Hut and Eric Decker didn't let that stop them. Instead, the culinary trendsetters rode over the entire pizza on a mobile broiler. Picture a ride-on lawnmower except instead of cutting grass, it bakes a pizza. Once the process was complete, the red-roofed restaurant reps carefully cut the arena-sized pizza into 68,000 slices. 

The competition for the world's largest pizza was, indeed, fierce. Before this accomplishment, a 4,137-square-foot pizza was deemed the largest in the world (via Guinness World Records). That pizza was so big it even had a first name — Ottavia — in honor of the Roman emperor Octavian Augustus. The chefs who put that one together, Dovilio Nardi, Andrea Mannocchi, and Matteo Giannotte, along with Marco and Matteo Nardi, did so in 2012.

But while that humungous, gluten-free deep dish was technically the largest round pizza on earth, Mental Floss reports there was an even larger pizza that simply wasn't round. That pizza, put together on the Naples waterfront by 250 international chefs, was 1.15 miles long and featured 4,400 pounds of mozzarella and 66 pounds of basil spanning the stretch of the Napoli Pizza Village, a festival that draws more than a million foodies each year (per Pizza Village). The Pizza Village installation was the latest in a long line of extremely lengthy pizzas. The previous record went to a pizza that was 6,333 feet long, which is almost a full mile, according to Guinness World Records.

It would take a great deal of tenacity to cook up this kind of competition, and what could be a better motivator than revenge?

Anytime you have the manpower and equipment necessary to create 68,000 slices of pizza, it's a cause for celebration. According to The New York Post, Pizza Hut wanted to celebrate the return of its iconic "Big New Yorker," a recipe that features foldable, on-the-go slices for busy Big Apple business types, presumably.

However, the New York Post reports that YouTube personality Airrack, whose real name is Eric Decker, just wanted to throw an epic pizza party, serve up slices of record-setting pizza, and get some savory revenge on the kids who didn't show up to his eighth birthday party. In a bittersweet Twitter telling of the backstory, Airrack wrote, "True story: When I was 8 yrs old I threw a pizza party at a bowling alley and no one showed up. To get revenge, I spent the past 18 years scheming how to make the world's largest pizza and today it happened. No one out-pizzas the hut."