The Official "Longest Pizza in the World" Record Was Set in Fontana This Weekend

“Check it out,” said the publicist. “You’re standing in pizza’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

Here were a couple dozen men in yellow shirts and white hats, coaxing an enormous mobile oven over the final stretch of a 1.3-mile-long ribbon of dough resting atop a trail of aluminum scaffolding. Some were trimming and aerating dough with plastic tools; some hovering around the mega-oven, inching it forward like a parade float. There were guys gently lifting folds of dough off the scaffolding, readying it for other guys who carefully inserted each contiguous portion into the 1,000-degree inferno’s mouth.

This team had started working at 7 the previous evening. Now it was 9 in the morning and no one had slept. The publicist kept pointing out all these important-sounding names and restaurants. It seemed as if everyone who was anyone in the pizza world had come to the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana to break the Guinness World Record for the Longest Pizza in the World.

The idea was hatched more than a year ago, after a handful of American pizza-industry vets got wind of the record set in Naples, Italy. (That pizza measured 6,082 feet and 3.4 inches long, or about 1.15 miles.) The quest to win the title for the United States had been nine months in the making. The Americans, led by Fash Asvadi, the founder of pizzaovens.com, secured sponsors to donate truckloads of cheese, sauce and flour. They needed a site that would be big enough — football fields were too small, airport runways had too many regulations, and environmental agencies nixed the plan to use the bike path stretching along the Pacific coast.

Read more: http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/the-official-longest-pizza-in-the-world-guinness-world-record-was-set-in-fontana-california-8322397