RAMALLAH, April 10 (JMCC) - In an effort to promote Palestinian culture, a group of Palestinians is planning this week to bake the largest ever dish of “musakhan” and enter it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

The traditional Palestinian dish, musakhan, is a loaf of toasted village bread covered with onions, the spice sumac, chicken, olive oil and toasted pine nuts or almonds.

“We will try by eating this bread to declare to the world that the traditional Palestinian musakhan is a landmark of Palestinian identity,” said Jamal Aruri, organizer of the project in the Ramallah-area village of Arura.

“Musakhan is a popular, completely Palestinian food, made in Palestinian villages and stolen from us by Israel,” Aruri continued. “We seek through this festival to distinguish musakhan as part of Palestinian culture.”

The loaf of bread on which the musakhan will be baked this coming Friday, March 16 will be 4.5 meters in diameter, and the total weight of the dish approximately one ton and 350 kilograms.

Aruri has been in contact with the Guinness book representatives, and all paperwork signed to put Palestinians on record with the largest loaf of musakhan in history. Forty chefs are expected to participate in making the musakhan, says Aruri.

The effort will be the latest in a string of record-making cuisine. Palestinians in Nablus registered the largest knafeh, a traditional Palestinian sweet, in July last year.

In 2009, Lebanon made the largest dish of tabouleh and Palestinians in Ramallah are planning to try to beat that record with their own giant plate of the parsley salad. Chefs in the Palestinian-Israeli village of Abu Ghosh recently stole the title from Lebanon for the largest plate of the chick-pea salad, hummus.

Aruri says he wants to use this event in the town of 2,000 to “support the boycott of Israeli products and Palestinian rural areas, which use their land to produce all of the ingredients of musakhan.”