Baking
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129 free Baking trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
61 free baking trivia questions with answers. Are you a baking enthusiast or professional baker looking to test your expertise? Our baking trivia quiz covers everything from basic techniques to advanced pastry skills. Whether you're curious about baking history, ingredient science, or famous bakers around the world, this quiz will challenge and entertain you!
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Q 01What common leavening agent requires an acid to activate and produce carbon dioxide gas?
Baking soda
Baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, is a base that produces carbon dioxide gas when it reacts with an acid and a liquid, causing baked goods to rise.
Q 02What do bakers call the final rest and rise of shaped bread dough, the yeast's last job before the oven?
Proofing
Proofing is the yeast's last shift: the shaped loaf rests while fermentation pumps out carbon dioxide, and that final swell is what the oven then sets.
Q 03The croissant's crescent shape was inspired by which Austrian pastry?
Kipferl
The kipferl dates back to at least the 13th century, and the modern croissant emerged only in the early 20th century when French bakers swapped its brioche dough for laminated yeast dough.
Q 04Which solid baking fat is named for the crumbly texture it gives pastry?
Shortening
Shortening is named for 'short' pastry: fat coats flour and shortens the gluten strands, giving a crumbly texture. The term long predates shelf-stable vegetable shortening such as Crisco, launched in 1911.
Q 05Which reaction between amino acids and sugars gives bread crust its colour and flavour?
Maillard reaction
The Maillard reaction is why crust tastes better than crumb: heat drives amino acids and sugars into melanoidins, the compounds behind browned food's colour and flavour.
Q 06Angel food cake is distinctive for being made without which of these ingredients?
Egg yolks
Angel food cake is made with egg whites only, no egg yolks or butter; the whipped whites provide all the lift, which is why the cake is virtually fat-free.
Q 07The word 'biscotti' comes from a Medieval Latin term meaning what?
Twice-cooked
Biscotti means 'twice-cooked': the dough is baked, sliced and baked again, which dries them out so they keep for ages and survive a dunk in Vin Santo.
Q 08Ciabatta, the holey Italian white loaf, was created in which decade?
1980s
Ciabatta dates only from the 1980s: baker Arnaldo Cavallari of Adria in the Veneto created it in 1982, and the name means 'carpet slipper' after its flat shape.
Q 09Canelés, the rum-and-vanilla pastries of Bordeaux, are baked in fluted molds of which metal, prized for conducting heat fast?
Copper
Copper molds, traditionally lined with tin and coated in beeswax, conduct heat fast enough to build the canelé's dark caramelised crust around a custardy centre.
Q 10In a classic sponge cake, how is the flour combined with the whisked egg whites and sugar?
Gently folded in
The flour is gently folded in because the whisked whites are a fragile foam of air and protein, and any rough mixing knocks that lift straight back out.
Q 11A 'blind bake' refers to what process in pie making?
Cooking the crust before adding the filling
Blind baking means cooking the crust before adding the filling, so a cream or pudding pie whose filling is never baked still gets a fully cooked, crisp shell.
Q 12Which of these is also known as confectioners' sugar?
Powdered
Powdered sugar is confectioners' sugar: granulated sugar ground to a fine dust, usually cut with 2 to 5 percent corn starch so it does not cake.
Q 13Croissant dough, with butter folded into it over and over, is called what?
Laminated dough
Q 21What pastry is made by boiling water, butter and flour, then beating in eggs, giving a hollow interior when baked?
Choux pastry
Choux pastry, also known as pâte à choux, is a light pastry dough that puffs up when baked, creating a hollow center. It's often used for éclairs, cream puffs, and profiteroles, relying on steam as its primary leavening agent.
Q 22Egg yolks' lecithin lets oil and water hold together in a batter; what is such a stable mix of immiscible liquids called?
Emulsion
An emulsion is what egg yolk makes every time it lets oil and water hold together; its lecithin coats the droplets so the two never separate. Mayonnaise works the same way.
Q 23Which ingredient gives sourdough bread its distinctive tangy flavor?
Lactic acid bacteria
Laminated dough is built by repeatedly folding and rolling a butter block into dough to stack many thin alternating layers; three letter folds, the usual croissant count, yield 27 layers of butter.
Q 14Settlers from which country brought 'olykoeks', fried balls of sweetened dough, to New York, where they became doughnuts?
The Netherlands
The Netherlands gave America the doughnut: Dutch settlers' olykoek, or 'oil cake', was described by Washington Irving in 1809 as 'balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat'.
Q 15Which dairy product is a key ingredient in traditional red velvet cake?
Buttermilk
Nineteenth-century chocolate cakes that combined it with raw cocoa powder turned a natural burgundy, long before red food coloring became standard.
Q 16Panettone, the tall domed Christmas sweet bread, is associated with which Italian city?
Milan
The name comes from the Milanese dialect panattón, and Italians regard it as a dessert that would look out of place in a bread bakery.
Q 17Creaming butter and sugar until pale and fluffy is done primarily to incorporate what into the batter?
Air
Creaming beats air into the fat as tiny bubbles, and those bubbles expand in the oven, giving butter cakes much of their lift before any chemical leavener does a thing.
Q 18The name 'baked Alaska' was supposedly coined in 1876 at which New York City restaurant?
Delmonico's
Delmonico's chef Charles Ranhofer is credited with naming the dessert in 1876 to mark the Alaska Purchase; the meringue shields the ice cream because egg-white foam is a poor conductor of heat.
Q 19Which elastic protein network forms when wheat flour meets water, letting bread dough stretch, trap gas and turn chewy?
Gluten
Gluten is not sitting in the flour bag as such; it forms only when water lets two wheat proteins, glutenin and gliadin, link into a stretchy net that traps the yeast's gas.
Q 20Which braided, egg-enriched bread is traditionally eaten on the Jewish Sabbath?
Challah
Challah is the braided, egg-enriched loaf blessed at Sabbath and festival meals; two loaves are set on the table in memory of the double portion of manna gathered before the Sabbath.
Lactic acid bacteria in the starter produce the lactic and acetic acids behind sourdough's tang; the species typical of San Francisco starters was named Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis after the city.
Q 24The dark, glossy skin of a traditional German pretzel comes from dipping the dough in what before baking?
Lye or washing soda
The alkaline dip accelerates browning, and lye pretzels remain a staple in southern Germany, Alsace, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.
Q 25What technique heats and cools chocolate to stabilise its crystals for a shiny finish and crisp snap?
Tempering
Tempering is crystal management: heating and cooling chocolate on a set curve wipes out the unstable cocoa-butter forms and leaves only Form V, which gives the gloss and snap.
Q 26What are meringues primarily made from?
Whipped egg whites and sugar
Meringue is whipped egg whites and sugar: whisking unfolds the egg-white protein ovalbumin into a foam that holds stiff peaks, and the sugar stabilises and sweetens it.
Q 27Which cookware company trademarked 'Bundt' and popularised the fluted ring pan in the 1950s and 1960s?
Nordic Ware
Nordic Ware, founded by H. David Dalquist in Minneapolis, cast the first fluted aluminium Bundt pan in 1950 and trademarked the name; the shape was modelled on the European Gugelhupf.
Q 28Which French preparation of chocolate and warm cream serves, depending on its ratio, as a glaze, a filling or a truffle centre?
Ganache
Ganache is just chocolate and cream, and the ratio does all the work: more cream gives a pourable glaze, more chocolate a firm truffle centre.
Q 29Which laminated Breton pastry folds butter and sugar into bread dough until it caramelises?
Kouign-amann
Kouign-amann is Breton for 'butter cake': the Douarnenez recipe layers bread dough with equal weights of butter and sugar, which melt and caramelise into a crisp, glossy crust.
Q 30The ruffled rim around the base of a well-baked Parisian macaron is known as its what?
Foot
The ruffled rim is the macaron's 'foot' (pied in French): resting the piped shells forms a skin, so in the oven the batter lifts from beneath and spreads out at the base.