Pangasinan town’s ‘puto’ mosaic makes it to Guinness

CALASIAO SNACK More than 300,000 bite-sized “puto,” a variety of rice cake produced in Calasiao town, Pangasinan, make up this giant mosaic featuring a man and his grandson enjoying the native snack. – WILLIE LOMIBAO

CALASIAO, Pangasinan — This town has landed in the Guinness World Records (GWR) for assembling the largest “puto” (rice cake) mosaic last year.

Mayor Joseph Arman Bauzon announced this on Sunday, the last day of this year’s Puto Festival celebration, after the GWR confirmed the feat that broke the world record set in Fukushima, Japan, on Aug. 4, 2012.

During the festival in 2017, 85 volunteers worked in three shifts to put together 320,000 pieces of puto to create a mosaic depicting an image of a man feeding his grandson with the rice cake.

The puto were bought from 30 local makers as the Calasiao government’s way of giving back to a homegrown industry that had made this town famous.

For three days in an airconditioned gymnasium here, the puto were assembled on 70 identical tables, which were carefully taken out one at a time to the city plaza, where they were pieced together to create the mosaic.

“The difficult part of the mosaic was composing the layout, to determine what colors would be used in each of the tables. It took us five days to accomplish that,” Bauzon said.

The assembly measured 209.37 square meters, almost four times larger than the 64-sq. m. rice cake mosaic in Fukushima. —Gabriel Cardinoza