This Nigerian Chef Just Made History By Making The World's Largest Pot Of Jollof Rice

Hilda Baci, a young chef, made culinary history this past week when she cooked the world's largest pot of a popular West African rice dish called jollof rice. The feat took place in Lagos, Nigeria, where a crowd of thousands came together to watch the jaw-dropping process of cooking thousands of pounds of jollof ... and, of course, eating it together afterwards. Jollof rice is traditionally seasoned with tomatoes, stocks, and spices as well as meat. It ought to be bright, flavorful, and spicy. Baci cooked 19,356 pounds and 9 ounces of jollof rice to break the record.

Baci aims to have her feat certified by the "Guinness Book of World Records" team, who laid down some very specific rules for producing record-setting jollof rice: It needed to be made of basmati rice, which was meant to constitute at least 80% of the finished weight (Baci used 8,800 pounds!), and none of it could be wasted, hence the scores of people gathered to eat up the food after the nine hours it took to cook. Ultimately, over 16,000 plates of rice were served — with no need to store any leftover rice in the freezer.

In a YouTube video of the process, Baci commented that her record-setting attempt was about more than personal glory. She stated that she wanted to bring worldwide attention to Nigerian food, which she says deserves to be more popular outside of Africa. For example, she stated, many Americans eat Chinese food, but not Nigerian, despite the latter being equally delicious.

Making jollof rice at home might be just one of the long list of uses for your rice cooker, but no store-bought pot was going to get the job done for Hilda Baci and her multiple tons of food! It took almost a full year of planning to pull off the cook, including the construction of a custom-made pot (which looks more like a shallow swimming pool) that was rated to hold 20,000 kilograms (over 44,000 pounds!) of food.

Baci originally planned to use 250 bags of basmati rice in her jollof, but scaled it back to 200 because she was worried about the final weight of the dish. As per Guinness requirements, every ingredient was weighed before it was added to the pot. Tomato paste can be used to upgrade jarred tomato sauce, but it was also the key to the bright orange color of Baci's jollof. Fresh goat meat was also incorporated in the dish, along with Baci's proprietary jollof blend. Nine people with wooden spatulas that were more like long boat paddles stirred the dish while Baci seasoned it with big handfuls of spices in a way that looked like a flower girl tossing handfuls of petals.

Despite her care for the weight of the immense pot of jollof, weighing the final product was still a problem because one of the pot's legs buckled under the weight when the time came to lift it up and make the weight Guinness-official. Baci's team will send multiple videos of the process as evidence to the certification team at Guinness to secure her victory.