A team in Yamagata, a prefecture in Japan northern, has set the Guinness World Records title for the Most soup served in 8 hours.
This record was set on 16 September at the annual Yamagata Imoni Festival which was celebrating its 30th year. Imoni is a type of soup with taro as its key ingredient and has been enjoyed by many parts of Japan for centuries.
In autumn people flock to the riverside with their friends, family, or colleagues and gather around a pot full of tasty imoni. This tradition is particularly common in the Yamagata prefecture - so much so that even local government sets up tap water and toilets on the riverside to cater to imoni partygoers.
So it's not a surprise that the local chamber of commerce has been hosting Yamagata Imoni Festival for three decades. Proclaimed to be the biggest festival of its kind in Japan, one of the key features is the mammoth six-metre pot used to cook the imoni. Thousands of people from all over Japan travel to Yamagata just to enjoy this massive event.
However, for this year, organisers wanted something more. They wanted to step up from being the best in the country, to being the best in the world.
A massive amount of ingredients were needed to achieve this goal: around three tons of taro, 1.2 tons of beef, 3,500 pieces of konjaku (a paste made from edible corm called konjak), 3,500 spring onions, 700 litres of soy sauce, 90 litres of sake, 200 kilograms of sugar, and six tons of water. The six-meter giant pot (which was renewed for this year's event) is heated up using around six tons of firewood.
After up to three hours of cooking, the imoni was ready to be served. But how to get the soup out from the giant pot? Their answer - use diggers.
The two brand new diggers brought in for were fitted with specially-made buckets and also had their arms taken apart, the mechanical greased washed off and replaced with butter!
After eight hours, the giant imoni was served to 12,695 people, achieving a new Guinness World Records - their goal of being the world's top officially accomplished.
Takahiro Sato, the mayor of Yamagata, was ecstatic about the outcome and expressed the significance of this year's festival.
"Imoni, which is a food culture of Yamagata, should be known across the globe through this record. We would like to continue pushing the word out."
Do you want to commemorate an important anniversary or milestone? Visit our Business Solutions pages or get in touch today to find out how a Guinness World Records attempt could inspire your marketing campaign or corporate event.
Related Articles
