French pizza champ crushes Guinness Record with 12,800 pizzas in nine hours: Is pizza France’s national dish?

Take a drive across France, and it is clear the national dish these days is far from French haute cuisine. At every service station, every village stop, every crossroad diner, there’s no sign of cordon bleu anything as the dominant choice from the most southerly borders to the ferry ports of the channel, the hands-down winner of the most in-demand food is … pizza. There are pizzerias everywhere in France, where once there were chic bistros and pastry bars with tobacconists attached. The French can’t seem to get enough of Italy’s most popular invention.

Hardly is it surprising that France now enters the Guinness Book of Records for its own version of the cheese and tomato-topped bread snack.

Vaucluse ace joins Naples team to obliterate old record

Aymeric Provence, the 44-year-old three-time world pizza champion from Cheval-Blanc in the Vaucluse, helped a 50-strong crew of pizza makers from France, Italy, Brazil and Eastern Europe smash the previous Guinness mark in Naples on 30 June. The old target stood at 12,000 pizzas in twelve hours. Provence and his mates knocked out 12,800 in just nine.

“It adds another line to my CV,” he laughs. “But getting into the Guinness Book of Records? I’m not going to do that 50 times in my life.” Provence already runs a pizza-makers’ training centre in Lambesc and knows a thing or two about pushing dough to the limit.

Heat, holes and no time for lunch

Work began the day before with dough kneading and box stacking, yet the clock only started once the first bases hit the tables. Judges demanded every pizza be round, hole-free, roughly 30 cm across and the right weight. Any duff one got chucked.

Scorching temperatures made the over-ripe dough stubborn to stretch. Nobody knew the running total, so the team simply kept going flat out with no breaks and no food. “We didn’t stop for a second,” Provence recalls. By around 7 pm the organisers from Gruppo La Piccola Napoli confirmed the haul. All 12,800 pies went straight to charities feeding sick children, police, firefighters and local queues that stretched fifty metres. Ovens stayed lit so everyone still waiting got a slice.

Echoes of Fuengirola’s charity pizza dash

Readers of Euro Weekly News will remember the December effort in Fuengirola, where Antonio Pucci and thirty pizzaioli lined up 2,344 pizzas along 700 metres of seafront promenade for childhood cancer charity AVOI. That Mediterranean sprint raised cash and smiles; the Naples marathon did the same on an industrial scale. In fact, one of the best pizzas in Spain was decided to be made by Belgian brothers!

Back home, Lambesc mayor Philippe Razeyre gave Provence a proper reception. Yet the Vaucluse man is already eyeing one last fling. The Pizza World Cup in Rome from September 29 to October 1 will see him mentor a couple of his trainees before he steps back from competition to concentrate on teaching. After nine blistering hours and a Guinness certificate, that sounds like a fair trade.