Puto Calasiao: The Fermented Rice Cake and the Town That Makes It

A small cake with a working address

Puto is part of Calasiao’s public identity. The Pangasinan provincial profile identifies the rice cake and its festival among the municipality’s defining attractions. Yet a town’s food deserves a closer address than a tourism slogan. Who chooses the rice? Who waits for the batter, empties the moulds, sells the morning batch and keeps customers coming back? Source 13

A 2013 report by Gabriel Cardinoza places production in Dinalaoan, Lumbang, Ambuetel and parts of Nalsian. These names matter: the familiar place name on a packet represents several neighbourhoods and many working households. It is more useful to follow those households than to hunt for an unsupported single inventor. Source 3

One especially revealing record is The Philippine Star’s 2010 interview with the de la Cruz family behind Bella’s Puto. Leonora kept a small selling space while her husband travelled to fiestas and carnivals. The couple recalled learning their recipes from their mothers and selling during the 1970s. They eventually opened near the Señor Divino Tesoro shrine and Sts. Peter and Paul church, naming the business after their eldest child. That is a history of instruction, movement and repeated sales, with women’s knowledge visible inside the familiar entrepreneurial story. Source 1

Calling this food heritage should make those ordinary activities easier to see. The value of an inherited skill includes the work of continuing to practise it: making a sale, training another pair of hands and deciding which changes customers will accept. A cake can carry a town’s name because people repeatedly connect the two through their labour.

Before the steam: rice, grinding and banga

In Cardinoza’s 2023 local account, preparation begins with a rice blend, soaking and stone grinding. The resulting batter ferments in banga, or earthen jars, before sugar is added and the mixture goes into small metal moulds for steaming. Then-mayor Kevin Roy Macanlalay particularly valued the jars in explaining the cakes’ soft texture. His account records local importance; it does not, by itself, prove that a jar alone determines the finished result. Source 2

The sequence makes a practical distinction visible. Rice selection is one decision, fermenting the batter another, and applying heat a third. Collapsing all three into a secret ingredient misses how many decisions lie between a sack of grain and a saleable batch. To document a maker’s method properly, one would need to watch those transitions and ask what the maker checks at each one.

Rice choice was itself open to experiment. In December 2013, Cardinoza reported a locally developed Calasiao rice variety being introduced for comparison with puto made from ordinary rice. His report traced the farmer training to Buenlag in 2011. Proposed municipal support for growers depended on customer acceptance. This was an effort to link farm selection with a particular food, not evidence that every producer had switched to one newly prescribed rice. Source 3

The interesting question is therefore larger than whether a packet says traditional. Can the farmer supply grain that a maker values? Can the maker explain that preference in terms that survive a change of harvest or supplier? Those conversations would preserve more usable knowledge than a slogan claiming that the recipe has never altered.

What the laboratory can tell us

Audrey Mae Villamin Orillaza, Honey Bhabes Iñigo and Baby Richard Navarro presented a study of fermented rice-cake batters in 2019. They isolated acetic acid bacteria and compared a bacterial gene sequence used in identification. Four of their six isolates came from Calasiao batter; the remaining isolates came from puto Lanson and puto Boac batters. The Calasiao isolates differed from the reference strains in their comparison, suggesting possible new Acetobacter species. Further work was required to establish that possibility. Source 4

This is a useful scientific opening, with a precise limit. Finding an organism in a sampled batter does not show that it creates every quality diners admire. A follow-up experiment would have to connect identified organisms, controlled preparation and measured changes in the cake. Nor does an identification result establish a health benefit from eating the finished product. Source 4

A different problem appears in Karen May Tanguilig’s 2015 University of the Philippines Diliman thesis: keeping the cake’s texture acceptable after preparation. She examined xanthan gum and then compared the selected formulation with a control during storage. The public abstract reports no perceptible sensory effect from the gum and no statistically significant improvement in the objective measures. Refrigeration made the tested cakes firmer and less moist. Those results describe a quality challenge; they do not validate a safe storage duration. Source 5

The distinction between texture and safe keeping is especially important for a food carried as a gift. A softer cake is not automatically safer, and a firmer cake does not automatically tell us why it changed. Producers need both an acceptable product and a verified process. Neither the word fermented nor a desirable mouthfeel can stand in for that work.

The selling day begins before the customer arrives

The 2010 Bella’s report described work beginning at 10 p.m. and finishing at 4 a.m., with restaurant customers collecting cakes for Metro Manila. Its timing adds something the celebratory success story can obscure: the morning purchase rests on a night’s work. The stall is only the visible end of production, handling and collection. Source 1

Government technical support addressed some of that material burden. The Department of Science and Technology’s April 2012 account of Bella’s describes a powered rice grinder, lanson sets and covers, and stainless worktables for removing cakes from moulds. Its Small Enterprise Technology Upgrading Program put equipment alongside the existing craft. Mechanisation entered particular tasks; the report does not show a machine replacing every judgment in the process. Source 6

The same agency account describes packaging and shelf-life research, including containers used under different storage conditions, and work on waste disposal in a residential production setting. Its value lies in the connection between a product and the conditions around it. The reported study is not a promise that any homemade puto, in any bag and refrigerator, will keep for the same length of time. Source 6

A useful account of continuity can therefore include a grinder, a clean table and a better package. The question is what each change enables, and what it costs in labour, access or product character. A new machine is neither proof of cultural loss nor proof of improvement. Its effect has to be understood in the particular workshop.

Roads, orders and the reach of a town food

The route to the buyer could change abruptly. In the 2013 report, tourism officer Verliza Abila linked a slump in stall trade to the closure of Villamil Bridge the previous year. Drivers took other routes. A food could remain well known while becoming harder to sell at its established location. Source 3

In December 2019, municipal administrator Mark Paolo Caspillan described using a simpler festival to support vendors displaced by road works. The local government earmarked ₱400,000 for relocation and bought 3,000 kilograms of puto for free distribution. A permanent selling site was still being sought. Access and parking were among the stated requirements: protecting an industry also involved where customers could stop. Source 8

The Decena family offers another route. In May 2020, Raquel Decena-Balisi told the Philippine News Agency that the family made puto in Calasiao, sent it by cargo to Metro Manila and accepted Instagram orders. Her father, Dominador “Ador” Decena, recalled growing up in his parents’ business. He also described replacing an unsuccessful margarine addition with cheese; ube with cheese had become a bestseller in their range. This is one family’s experience during quarantine, rather than evidence that every stall prospered. Source 7

Inheritance leaves room for another idea

Erlinda Torres’s story makes a further kind of movement visible. A 2021 enterprise profile published as a press release in Punto! Central Luzon describes her helping her mother sell kakanin, later working abroad and in other employment, then developing Pinay Decena’s Calasiao Puto. The business name honours her mother. The profile records participation in the 2017 Kapatid Mentor Me programme and an effort to sustain staff and delivery relationships during the pandemic. Its promotional purpose deserves recognition, but the named career shows how returning to a family food can follow a long working life elsewhere. Source 12

Innovation can also be quite playful. In October 2025, GMA Regional TV interviewed Rudy dela Cruz about black puto offered for Undas. The colouring ingredient was not disclosed, and the account described limited production with later orders by arrangement. Customer Carlito Corpuz was buying gifts for coworkers before travelling to Baguio. A seasonal variation and an ordinary act of pasalubong belonged in the same small transaction. Source 10

That example poses a better question than whether new colours are permitted by tradition. Who is making the change, how is it described, and can a customer still understand what is being bought? Clear naming lets a maker offer a new version without pretending it has always existed. It also lets customers choose the qualities they want to support.

A celebration worth bringing back to the workshop

The public spectacle has its own record. Guinness World Records documents a 209.37-square-metre rice-cake mosaic made in Calasiao on 8 December 2017 to promote the local product. The achievement gives a date and a measured size to a community celebration. It should not be confused with proof of the cake’s first invention, or with an account of the everyday conditions of its makers. Source 9

The research programme called Amputi Balitok, or White Gold, asks a broader question. Dylan Cariño and coauthors worked with Calasiao’s tourism and agriculture offices; the project was presented in 2023 and its journal article appeared online in March 2025. Its stated approach combines culinary mapping, visual documentation, interviews and documentary study, treating the food’s culinary, social and economic importance together. That offers a sound direction for future documentation: ask how a valued food is practised and sustained. Source 11

For Calasiao, a worthwhile food archive would preserve more than a list of ingredients. It could record how different makers describe a suitable batch, how children and employees learn, which jobs have become easier, and what happens when a selling place moves. Makers should help decide what can be shared and what remains their own working knowledge. The aim would be to make room for another generation to earn, learn and keep producing a cake that people recognise as belonging to this town.