On Tuesday morning, a team of chefs in Shediac, New Brunswick, rose early and headed to a secret-ish location. If all goes well, over the next couple of days, they’ll shape and bake a fluffy bread roll longer than a basketball court.
They’ll mix scores of pounds of lobster meat with a few gallons of mayonnaise and a dozen heads of shredded lettuce. And they’ll put it all together to form a delicious-yet-intimidating summer treat—the longest lobster roll yet known to man.These chefs are attempting to break a very specific world record. But they’re also firing the latest salvo in what has become an international lobster roll war: a multi-year claws race that has been mired by botched record-keeping, rocked by bread-related controversies, and escalated such that the sandwich-making prowess of one small town has come to stand in for the honor of an entire nation.
It all started back in 2014 in Shediac, a town of about 6,600 people tucked into an inlet on the New Brunswick coast. The town—one of several East Coast spots that calls itself the Lobster Capital of the World—holds an annual festival celebrating its ties to all things crustacean. “That year was the 65th anniversary of the Lobster Festival,” explains Pierre Cormier of the Shediac Chamber of Commerce. “So we were looking to make a 65-foot lobster roll.”
At first, they didn’t realize the audacity of this plan, but as they began researching tips and techniques, they realized that no one had yet accomplished a lobster roll of this length.
The closest they could find was 61 feet, a feat accomplished in 2009 in Portland, Maine. “We came across that it would be a world record,” says Cormier. “So that’s how it all started.” (After a later discovery that chefs in New York state actually held the record, with a 66-foot lobster roll constructed in 2010, organizers upped their goal to 68 feet.)When it comes to lobster roll length, the hard part isn’t the meat or the mayo—it’s the bread. In order to be deemed legitimate by the World Record Academy—a competitor of Guinness that offers “unlimited categories”— a record-breaking roll “has to be one unified bread from one end to the other,” says Cormier.
Shediac Lobster Festival organizers say this is the world’s longest lobster roll. CTV News at 5 tonight. https://t.co/gCeQb7ryt7
— David Bell CBC (@DavidBellCBC)
After much trial and error, Shediac chefs came up with a strategy: running a massive snake of risen dough through a conveyer belt oven, over and over, until it was unbroken and golden brown. The process “takes between 12 and 14 hours,” says Cormier.
The 68-foot roll was a success, unveiled as part of the 2014 festival’s opening ceremonies and gobbled up by attendees. (Proceeds went toward scholarships for local students.) Meanwhile, across the Northumberland Strait, the people of Prince Edward Island were watching. PEI is also known for its lobster, and the organizers of the island’s annual International Shellfish Festival were sure they could do better.
So in September of 2015, chefs there spent ten hours constructing…
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