The birthplace of pizza may be Naples, Italy, where the art of making that irresistible combo of crispy dough, sauce and cheese has even been included on a UNESCO list of the Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and which draws travellers to this day to taste 'authentic' pizza right at its origin.
But there may be no better indicator of how pizza has become a global - and especially American - phenomenon than the latest successful attempt to create the world's biggest pizza.
An American record-breaking attempt has bumped a group of Italian chefs off the record-breaking, pizza-baking podium.
To celebrate the return of its "big New Yorker" pizza, Pizza Hut decided to celebrate by setting a new world record for the world's biggest pizza.
To do so, the company went to the Los Angeles Convention Center, which had enough space to fit a a 13,990-square-foot (nearly 1,300 square meters) pizza. As reported by CNN, the work on the world-record pizza started on 18JAN. By 20JAN the work was finished, and the Guinness World Record confirmed that it was indeed the biggest pizza ever made.
To complete the massive task, workers put down layers of dough first, tomato sauce were painted on, then toppings were added. Once everything was set, it was baked in pieces on-site.
In total, the world-breaking pizza consisted of 13,653 pounds (6,193 kilograms) of dough, 4,948 pounds of pizza sauce, more than 8,800 pounds of cheese and roughly 630,496 pieces of pepperoni.
That's a lotta pie. And it didn't go to waste. According to Pizza Hut, pieces of the massive pizza pie were donated to several charities in Los Angeles.
According to CNN, the previous Guinness record for the world's largest pizza was set in 2012 by a group of Italian chefs. Their pizza was approximately 13,580 square feet, gluten-free, and even had a name: Ottavia.
