Largest Seafood Stew Sets Guinness World Record by UMass Amherst
Amherst — Moments after the University of Massachusetts broke the world record for whipping up the largest seafood stew Monday, hundreds of students lined up to break their own personal records for seafood consumption.
For an hour, a team of chefs had been assembling and stirring the ingredients – 1,000 pounds of seafood, 1,137 pounds of potatoes, 575 pounds of onions and much, much more – in a 1-ton frying pan on a traffic island opposite the Haigis Mall on Massachusetts Avenue.
Largest Seafood Stew picture
The school’s goal was simple: setting a new Guinness World Record for seafood stew, similar to the record it set last year for stir-fry with a 4,010-pound creation.
For students, the reasons for attending the back-to-school celebration were more pragmatic.
“If someone is going to offer me free lobster, I’m not going to walk away,” said Cameren Cabeceiras, a sophomore from of Fall River.
Along with non-fish-eating friend Isabella Chen of Westford, Cabeceiras waited as the cooking crew brought the lobster, mussels, clams, haddock and salmon to a boiling point, making it suitable for serving.
As the crowd gathered around the huge, steaming vat, students jockeyed for position to get a glimpse, and maybe a cell-phone photo, of what exactly 6,500 pounds of fish stew looked like.
At one point, the crowd chanted “Fish Stew. Fish Stew. Fish Stew.”
By 6:30, the smell of 1,000 pounds of cooking fish was drifting across campus. The crowd was getting larger and hungrier, and some wondered whether neighborhood cats would be arriving soon.
The wait for the world record ended at about 6:50 p.m., when 6,500 pounds mark was reached and Queen’s “We Are The Champions” began echoing across the mall.
Amherst — Moments after the University of Massachusetts broke the world record for whipping up the largest seafood stew Monday, hundreds of students lined up to break their own personal records for seafood consumption.
For an hour, a team of chefs had been assembling and stirring the ingredients – 1,000 pounds of seafood, 1,137 pounds of potatoes, 575 pounds of onions and much, much more – in a 1-ton frying pan on a traffic island opposite the Haigis Mall on Massachusetts Avenue.
The school’s goal was simple: setting a new Guinness World Record for seafood stew, similar to the record it set last year for stir-fry with a 4,010-pound creation.
For students, the reasons for attending the back-to-school celebration were more pragmatic.
“If someone is going to offer me free lobster, I’m not going to walk away,” said Cameren Cabeceiras, a sophomore from of Fall River.
Along with non-fish-eating friend Isabella Chen of Westford, Cabeceiras waited as the cooking crew brought the lobster, mussels, clams, haddock and salmon to a boiling point, making it suitable for serving.
As the crowd gathered around the huge, steaming vat, students jockeyed for position to get a glimpse, and maybe a cell-phone photo, of what exactly 6,500 pounds of fish stew looked like.
At one point, the crowd chanted “Fish Stew. Fish Stew. Fish Stew.”
By 6:30, the smell of 1,000 pounds of cooking fish was drifting across campus. The crowd was getting larger and hungrier, and some wondered whether neighborhood cats would be arriving soon.
The wait for the world record ended at about 6:50 p.m., when 6,500 pounds mark was reached and Queen’s “We Are The Champions” began echoing across the mall.
