France reclaims world record after baking baguette measuring 140.53m

For the past five years, bragging rights over the world’s longest baguette have belonged not to the residents of a small village or a city in France, but rather to a clutch of bakers 500 miles away in Como, Italy.

On Sunday a crop of 12 bakers from France set out to rectify this, spending hours kneading, shaping and baking their way back to victory.

Some 14 hours later, their efforts were declared a success. “The world record for the longest baguette has been broken,” the municipality of Suresnes, in the western suburbs of Paris, wrote on its social media account. “The baguette made today in Suresnes measures 140.53m!!!!”

The bakers had begun toiling at 3am in the hope of beating the standing record of 132.62 metres.

Although about 320 baguettes are thought to be sold every second in France, the 2019 feat by Italy was not the first time the country had laid claim to the title of longest baguette; in 2015 a 122-metre baguette baked at the Milan Expo was certified as record-breaking.

“In Italy?” one local told newspaper Le Parisien this week as he emerged from a bakery, baguette firmly tucked under his arm. “That’s crazy. If there’s one record that should belong to us in France, it’s that one.”

The sentiment was echoed among the bakers who gathered at Suresnes’ Terrasse du Fécheray observation deck, where their record-breaking attempt unfolded against a backdrop of sweeping views of Paris and the Eiffel Tower.

“I hope that we’ll be able to recover the record for France,” Sylvain Lecarpentier, one of those taking part, had written in a post on social media in the lead up to the event.

In a statement publicising the event, organisers laid out the gruelling challenge that the bakers were up against. “The dough will be kneaded, shaped on site, and then baked in front of the public in a rolling oven under a tent,” it said. “It will be made according to the rules of the art, with wheat flour, water, yeast and salt as the only ingredients.”

The baguette, which had to be at least 5cm thick along its entire length, was expected to take about eight hours to bake, the statement added.

Some 13 hours after the bakers began, the municipality said the baguette was complete. “Now the big question is: how big is our #baguette?,” it asked on social media, adding in a photo of the baguette as it was being measured.

The baguette will now be cut up to be shared among the public, as well as distributed to people living on the streets of Suresnes.