Australia cooks up world record risotto

guido · Site Admin Joined: Oct 18, 2004 Posts: 390 Location: Italy

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian aid workers and celebrity chefs have cooked up a storm beside the scenic Sydney Harbour, creating a record 7.5-tonne bowl of risotto to help raise awareness about world hunger.

Volunteers used oar-size paddles to stir tonnes of ingredients in a custom-made pan on Friday to create the world's biggest bowl of risotto, a monster dish of rice, peas and saffron.

The huge dish was made to celebrate the U.N. International Year of Rice. Rice is a staple food for more than half the world's population.

U.N. officials said 840 million people around the world are undernourished, of whom 200 million are children. Every day 25,000 people die of starvation, they said.

Guinness Book of Records officials said the previous record rice dish tipped the scales at 6.3 tonnes. Friday's monster creation weighed in at about 7.5 tonnes, they said.

Working under the shadow of the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge, volunteers used 1.6 tonnes of arborio rice, 4,400 litres of stock, 800 kg of frozen peas, 1.5 kg of saffron and 600 kg of cheese and butter.

They also threw in a pungent 20 kg of garlic, along with 400 kg of onions and celery.

It took about three hours to cook the risotto in a custom-made solid steel pan measuring 10 metres by 3.6 metres, the largest of its kind in the world.

The risotto was fed to bemused lunch-time crowds in return for donations, with money raised given to charity group CARE Australia for the fight against world hunger.

Rice farmer Ray Hunt said the record could be unbeatable.

"It'll never be broken, no one is stupid enough to," Hunt told Reuters.
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In vino veritas!