Attendees got to grab a free bite of what may be the biggest ever bagel and lox sandwich on Friday.
Greenpoint-based smoked fish wholesaler Acme and Zucker’s Bagels, of TriBeCa, attempted to set a Guinness World record on National Bagels and Lox Day, with a lox-and-cream cheese everything bagel clocking in at more than 200 pounds.
Acme co-CEO Adam Caslow and helpers assembled and weighed the massive sandwich — 13 inches by 29 inches by 36 inches in dimension — at Acme’s smokehouse at 30 Gem St. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, before cutting it up and distributing the pieces to a packed room of witnesses attending the free event.
Zucker’s founder Matt Pomerantz had been practicing his baking for a few weeks, and the bagel itself was expected to weigh 100 pounds, Caslow said Thursday.
On Friday, sandwich makers spread cream cheese onto the bottom half of the bagel before covering it in roughly 40 pounds of smoked salmon, then piling tomato and onion slices on top, and sprinkling capers over everything. Caslow and crew struggled to keep sliding vegetables securely in place, and, at the last minute, they realized they had to engineer a way to transfer the ginormous bagel from the table onto the scale.
“Move that bagel!” spectators chanted as Acme staffers pushed the sandwich onto a flat cardboard box and, from there, onto the weighing platform.
If Acme and Zucker’s are successful in setting a new Guinness World food record, this won’t be New York City’s first. We have rounded up a few of the most memorable established in recent years:
World’s largest green bean casserole
Last November, at the Italian restaurant inside Macy’s Herald Square location, the frozen and canned vegetable retailer Green Giant whipped up a green bean casserole outweighing the 551-pound record of comparable foods like mashed potatoes. That feat required a whopping 780 cans of green beans, 53 cans of mushroom soup, 32 quarts of milk and 65 pounds of French fried onions, a spokeswoman said. It took cooks more than six hours to open all the cans. When a Guinness official weighed and measured the casserole, it clocked in at 637 pounds.
World’s longest line of hot dogs
In 2016, hot dog institution Nathan’s Famous celebrated its 100th anniversary by assembling in a continuous line a record-breaking 1,916 dogs — in honor of the year the company was founded — at Grand Central Terminal in midtown. To break the previous record of an 846-foot line set in Tokyo in 2014, Nathan’s staff prepared the hot dogs in buns, wrapped them in tin foil, and lined them up end-to-end to create 958 continuous feet.
Most candles lit on a birthday cake
Queens resident and serial record breaker Ashrita Furman memorialized what would have been his spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy’s 85th birthday last December by lighting a record number of candles — 72,585, to be exact — on a ginormous spongecake. (Compare that to the previous record of 50,151 candles lit in Los Angeles in April 2016.) It took a team of 100 people at the Sri Chinmoy Centre in Jamaica to prepare the cake in the shape of a picture frame 80.5 feet long and 2 feet wide, place the candles and ignite them with 60 blowtorches. They burned for roughly 40 seconds before they were snuffed out with fire extinguishers.
World’s largest collection of pizza boxes
Self-described “professional pizza enthusiast” Scott Wiener, whose pizza tour company guides participants through the five boroughs, holds the record for the world’s largest collection of pizza boxes, clocking in at 595 containers. He houses them all in his Flatbush, Brooklyn, apartment. The assembly spans 42 countries and four decades, according to the Guinness World Records website.
Most Carolina Reaper chili peppers consumed in under 60 seconds
In April 2016, Jamaica resident Wayne Algenio ate a then-record 119 grams of the world’s hottest peppers in less than one minute. (If you think jalapeños are hot, they pale in comparison to Carolina Reaper chillies, which measure roughly 1.6 million on the Scoville heat scale for peppers and hot sauces — making them 300 times as spicy.) Algenio wolfed down 22 peppers at the New York Hot Sauce Expo in Greenpoint last year, but he has since been knocked from his world-record perch; in November, a California man devoured 120 grams of the mouth-burning veggies.
World’s most expensive soufflé available commercially
If you have an extra $2,500 burning a hole in your pocket, you could spend it on the world’s most expensive soufflé, prepared by the executive chefs at Petrossian. The upscale midtown cafe’s quail egg and caviar dish is topped with gold leaf and a flambéed cognac that sells for more than $4,000 a bottle.
Most sandwiches made in one hour
On May 21, 2013, the Midwest-based Eckrich Bacon Lovers Deli Meats partnered with volunteers from Operation Homefront, a nonprofit supporting military families and veterans, to assemble a record-breaking 2,706 hero sandwiches in one hour at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. (The previous record was a paltry 1,660 sandwiches.) That food didn’t go to waste — it was donated to Operation Homefront and the food rescue organization City Harvest to feed hungry New Yorkers.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story misstated the number of cans of green beans in the casserole. It is 780.
