Sometimes extra cheese just isn’t enough. For French pizza chef Benoît Bruel, who set a Guinness world record in 2020 for the cheesiest pizza on the planet with 254 different cheeses, even that didn’t suffice, especially after another chef, Morgan Niquet, broke his record by piling 834 different cheeses on a single pie.

Bruel wanted to reclaim the record. So he teamed up with fellow pizzaiolo Fabien Montellanico, cheesemaker Sophie Hatat Richart-Luna and YouTube personality Florian OnAir and took the classic cheese pizza to a new extreme—this time with 1,001 different types of cheese.

As Guinness World Records reported on December 28, 2023, Bruel scoured France for more cheese varieties over a period of five months. In the end, he sourced 940 French cheeses, plus 61 from other countries around the world, and set a new world record.

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The team’s achievement also set a new world record for the largest display of cheese varieties (1,001), beating out fellow Frenchman Philippe Marchand, who procured 730 different cheeses in 2016.

“It’s been a real feat being among the cheesemakers as well as being on the farms to meet the producers who are so passionate about their profession,” Bruel told Guinness World Records.

Many of those farmers and cheesemakers donated their cheeses for free, hoping to play a role in the record-breaking stunt.

To achieve an edible pizza, Bruel and his partners cut a two-gram cube of each cheese and placed them all on the pizza base, layering the softer cheeses on top of the harder ones. “We had to pre-cook the pizza dough to prevent it tearing up with the weight of all that cheese,” Bruel said.

They placed a cookie cutter around the pile of cheese to make sure it held together in the oven. After two minutes, the cookie cutter was removed, and the pizza went back into the oven for 20 more seconds before it was ready to eat.

Bruel hasn’t given up his search for new cheeses. “I have been a pizza maker for 13 years,” he told Guinness World Records. “I invented my own pizza recipes, and, since working in my own business, my only dream is to make pizzas with the widest variety of cheeses.”