Hilda Baci, a Nigerian chef and restaurateur, talked about a tense moment during her successful attempt to break the Guinness World Record for cooking the largest pot of jollof rice.
The giant pot she used unexpectedly collapsed at the World Jollof Festival in Lagos on September 12. While a crane was lifting the massive pot for weighing, one side gave way and the legs buckled. Luckily, the food stayed intact.
READ ALSO: Big 3: ‘Wizkid, Davido, Burna… a Group of Troublesome Men’- Olamide
“When we had the mishap with the pot, my first few seconds, my heart was in my hands. I was very scared, very worried.”
Hilda said she was really scared at first but focused on serving the food to people rather than just achieving the record. She felt the pot collapsing actually helped make distributing the food easier – like a “blessing in disguise.”
In her words: “For me, the record was not the most important thing. It was important that people got to taste and enjoy the food we had spent hours making.” “I would say it was a good thing that the pot caved because it made food distribution a lot easier… it was a blessing in disguise,” she continued.
Hilda’s team submitted evidence to Guinness World Records, and they confirmed her as the record-holder for the largest pot of jollof rice cooked. “So I reached out to our adjudicator, and I let him know that the pot caved… And he’s like, let’s just proceed…we had to look for different cameras to see if we had a recording, a clear recording of that, because for me, transparency is very, very important.”
“So once we were able to establish that we had a clear recording of that, it was just straight to the next thing, like to distribute the food.”
Hilda saw becoming a two-time Guinness World Record holder as a testament to “God is good and I’m a child of grace.” This adds to her earlier record for the longest cooking marathon.
