Portuguese chefs set a new record on Saturday when they cooked up the world's largest ever omelette.

The record attempt was part of an annual three day festival that takes place in the town of Ferreira do Zêzere, in the central city of Santarém.

Organised by the local council, the festival aims to bring together local people that may normally live or work outside of Portugal who are returning for the summer to visit friends and relatives.

Guinness World Record adjudicator Louise Toms was on hand to observe as 145,000 free range eggs were poured into a huge pan along with 880lbs of oil and 220lbs of butter.

The pan used for the attempt was impressive in itself, measuring over 10metres in diameter and weighing 9458lbs.

Once the chefs had been briefed, a total of 150 people took to the pan in shifts, using gigantic flat scrapers that were designed to keep the mixture moving.

For six hours, the volunteer chefs continually scrapped and pulled the mixture under the watchful eye of head chef Pedro Mendes.

Tension began to mount as high winds began to build during the attempt, raising concerns that it could affect the cooking of the omelette. The chefs nevertheless had to persevere under the tough conditions as increasing the cooking heat would likely cause the eggs to burn.

After about five hours, things began to take shape and a section of omelette was pulled from the pan to show that slow but very steady progress was being made.

After the six hour mark, the tired but happy chefs were finally able to remove their scrapers and transfer the super-sized omelette to a set of weighing scales.

The record to beat was a 4.401 tonnes (9,702 lb 8 oz) omelette cooked up in Ankara in Turkey in October 2010.

After the scales had finally settled, GWR adjudicator Louise was able to confirm the egg-cellent news to the chefs that they had indeed set a new world record, with the omelette weighing in at a whopping 6.466 tonnes (14, 225 lbs. 6 oz.), breaking the previous benchmark by quite some margin.

Following the weigh-in, festival goers were given a chance to sample the chefs hard work, with the omelette shared out to members of the public.