Venezuela Breaks Three Guinness World Food Records with National Christmas Dish
On Saturday Venezuela was awarded three world records in a special preparation of its hallmark Christmas dish.
In a public event organised by the Venezuelan Food Ministry in Caracas, over 500 workers prepared the world’s largest hallaca (120 metres long), the longest ham bread (20 metres x 30cm), and the largest sugarcane & lemon juice (12,000 litres).
The hallaca is a traditional dumpling-type Venezuelan and Latin American Christmas dish, in which cornmeal dough is stuffed with beef, pork, olives and other ingredients, and then wrapped in plantain leaves for boiling or steaming.
Ham bread (pan de jamón) is also a popular Christmas food, with ham and other ingredients stuffed into a long loaf of bread.
The record-winning dishes required hours of preparation and hundreds of kilos of ingredients, 95% of which were sourced nationally. Once the records were certified by a Guinness official, portions of the Christmas dinner were shared out to the public.
Venezuelan food minister Yvan Bello congratulated all those who participated in the making of the successful record. He also used the occasion to insist that there is a plentiful supply of Christmas fayre in Venezuela this season, despite the product shortages and high inflation that have been experienced this year.
“Supply of all Christmas products in guaranteed,” he told media, while announcing that from Monday to Sunday last week 9,150 tons of Christmas foods were sold at low prices to 380,000 families at government fairs across the country.
