Huge Matzo Ball Marks Jewish Food Fest

The   3^rd  Annual Jewish Food  Festival Kicked off with a bang. Mostly Jewish Food   does not get a complete touch without the mention of their   traditional Matzo ball.  They are a staple food on  Passover. The Matzo ball are usually immersed in chicken soup. The ball is made up of a mixture of eggs, Matzo meal, water and oil. The chefs thought what could be the better way than   make a giant sized dumpling  thus marking  start of the Jewish food festival  in a traditional way.

Executive Chef John Wirtis   got his act together   by using 125 pounds of Matzo meal,  25 pounds of chicken   fat( schmaltz), added more than 1000 eggs and 20 pound s of potatoes starch. He cooked up the big ball in a six-foot high, six-foot wide pot. With all the effort and materials into the making the Matzo ball grew   larger in size and weighed 488  pounds  and measured  106 inches in diameter. The ingredients included were 1,000 eggs, 25 pounds of chicken fat, and 125 pounds of matzo meal.  And for the chicken soup alone, chefs used 320 chickens, 80 pounds of carrots, 40 pounds of celery, and 40 pounds of onions.

It took a fork lift to reveal the giant matzo ball and a scale fixed to the crane to read the weight.  The chef says the biggest challenge was getting the bread to stick together, so he had to modify his grandmother's old recipe to make a matzo ball of that size. The secret ingredient ended up being potato starch, which bonded the other ingredients together.   He covered the matzo ball in heavy cheese cloth to hold it together during the hours of boiling it took to cook it all the way through, and the rest is world-record-setting history.  Chefs at Desert Diamond Casino and the Hilton El Conquistador Resort helped make the hundreds of gallons of broth needed to cook the matzo ball.

The previous record  for the largest Matzo ball weighed 267 pound  and was set by Anthony Sylvestri  of Noah's Ark Deli in New York .John Wirtis the chef at Shlomo and Vito’s New York Delicatessen  smashed the previous record by nearly 160 pounds.

The Largest Matzo Ball weighed  488 pound and was set by Shlomo and Vito  Restaurant Chef John Wirtis  at the 3^rd annual Jewish Food Festival at Tuscon, Arizona, United States of America on November 10, 2010.