BBQ Trivia
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100 free BBQ trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free BBQ trivia questions with answers. This BBQ trivia quiz is built for cookouts, tailgates, Fourth of July parties and anyone who has ever argued about sauce. It covers where the word 'barbecue' actually comes from, the four big American regional styles - Carolina, Memphis, Kansas City and Texas - and what makes each one different, from vinegar and mustard sauces to burnt ends and salt-and-pepper brisket. There are questions on the science too: what a smoke ring really is and why the pink does not mean the meat is raw. Then it heads outdoors and abroad: the Chicago sheet-metal shop that turned buoy halves into the Weber kettle, the Ford relative who invented charcoal briquettes, the world's biggest pork barbecue contest, Korean bulgogi, Argentine asado, South Africa's braai and Jamaica's jerk. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for the whole table; the rest will separate the pitmasters from the people holding the tongs. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The English word 'barbecue' comes, via Spanish 'barbacoa', from the language of which people?
The Taíno
The Taíno word barbacoa first named a raised rack of sticks, used for sleeping on as well as for curing meat, so it described a piece of furniture long before it meant a feast.
Q 02Which country lends its name to a stir-fried 'barbecue' that was actually invented in Taiwan in 1951?
Mongolia
Mongolia never had it: Taiwanese comedian Wu Zhaonan created the dish at an eatery he opened in Taipei in 1951, and it is stir-fried on a searing round griddle rather than barbecued.
Q 03In North Carolina, what are the two rival barbecue styles that feud light-heartedly with each other?
Lexington and Eastern
Lexington and Eastern fans have fought it out in the legislature: a bill to make Lexington's festival the state's official food festival stalled, so a 2007 law crowned it for the Piedmont Triad only.
Q 04In North Carolina's Piedmont, barbecue joints dress 'red slaw' with what in place of a creamy dressing?
Ketchup
Ketchup, or the pit's own tomato-and-vinegar 'dip', colours the chopped cabbage, so the slaw on a western North Carolina barbecue tray is seasoned with the same sauce as the meat.
Q 05What makes Memphis-style 'dry' ribs dry?
A spice rub and no sauce
A spice rub and no sauce is the signature of the Rendezvous, yet ribs came late to it: Charlie Vergos opened the Memphis basement in 1948 selling ham sandwiches, and turned to ribs only in the 1950s.
Q 06Which popular pork ribs are cut from the top of the rib cage, where the bones meet the spine?
Baby back ribs
Baby back ribs are 'baby' only because they are shorter than spare ribs, which come from lower down by the belly; the pigs themselves are fully grown.
Q 07Henry Perry, the 'father of Kansas City barbecue', sold his slow-cooked ribs wrapped in what?
Newspaper
Newspaper pages held a 25-cent slab from the pit Perry started in 1908; after he died in 1940 the business passed to Charlie Bryant and then to his brother Arthur, whose name it made famous.
Q 08Which supermarket barbecue sauce was created in 1977 by Rich Davis, a child psychiatrist?
KC Masterpiece
KC Masterpiece began as 'K.C. Soul Style Barbecue Sauce'; its thick, molasses-sweet recipe broke with the city's older peppery sauces, and Davis sold it in 1986 to the Kingsford arm of Clorox.
Q 09Which Kansas City speciality was once handed out free to customers at Arthur Bryant's counter?
Burnt ends
Burnt ends were still free in 1972, when Calvin Trillin wrote that his main course at Bryant's was 'the burned edges of the brisket', pushed aside for anyone to take; the scraps became the star of the city's barbecue.
Q 10Central Texas barbecue is usually rubbed with only which two seasonings?
Salt and black pepper
Salt and black pepper suit a style born in immigrant butcher shops around Austin, which smoked the fresh meat that went unsold and sold it by weight, with no sauce needed.
Q 11Which immigrant community, settling in Texas in the 1800s, is credited with making smoked brisket popular there?
Jewish
Jewish delis from Greenville to El Paso were selling smoked brisket by the early 1900s, some fifty years before Black's in Lockhart built a barbecue menu around the cut.
Q 12From which part of the cow does brisket come?
The breast or lower chest
The breast or lower chest is hard-working muscle that helps hold up the standing animal, so brisket is laced with connective tissue, turns tender only after hours of slow cooking, and was long one of the cheapest cuts.
Q 13Pulled pork is almost always made from which cut?
Shoulder
Q 21In which city was the Weber kettle grill invented?
Chicago
Chicago's Weber Brothers Metal Works made everything from hinges to wagons; Stephen, fed up with wind and rain ruining meals on open braziers, gave his grill a lid and later bought the firm outright.
Q 22Kingsford charcoal is named for Edward G. Kingsford, a relative by marriage of which industrialist?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford hated waste, so scrap wood from Model T production was pressed into briquettes and sold through his car dealerships; Kingsford, his cousin's husband, had scouted the Michigan timberland.
Q 23Which cartoon dad sells 'propane and propane accessories' and cannot abide grilling over charcoal?
Hank Hill
Shoulder is sold under the misleading name Boston butt, though it comes from the top of the shoulder blade, nowhere near the rear; hours of low, slow cooking break it down until it shreds by hand.
Q 14South Carolina's distinctive mustard-based barbecue sauce is traced to settlers from which country?
Germany
Germany's emigrants settled around Orangeburg in the mid-1700s and cooked with mustard, which is why the golden sauce rules the Midlands while other parts of the state lean on vinegar or tomato.
Q 15North Alabama's signature 'white sauce' is based on what?
Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise, cider vinegar and pepper made the sauce Bob Gibson created in Decatur in 1925; his cooks dunked smoked chickens in it and joked that the birds were being baptized.
Q 16Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce takes its name from a founder's boyhood nickname in which sport?
Basketball
Basketball earned Dave Raymond the name Sweet Baby Ray; in 1985 the sauce he and his brother Larry made placed second among some 700 entries at a cook-off, and the brothers turned it into a business.
Q 17The pink 'smoke ring' under the surface of smoked meat forms when a gas from the fire reacts with which protein?
Myoglobin
Myoglobin, the pigment that makes raw meat red, normally browns as it cooks; nitric oxide from the wood smoke binds to it first, so the outer band stays pink however long the meat is smoked.
Q 18Which salt, also used on ham and pastrami, lets cooks fake a barbecue smoke ring?
Curing salt
Curing salt carries the nitrite that keeps ham pink, and it pinks barbecue the same way, so the band can be made with no smoker at all and says little about how the meat was cooked.
Q 19True 'low and slow' barbecue smoking holds the pit near which temperature for hours on end?
120 °C (250 °F)
120 °C (250 °F) is gentle enough to give a tough cut's connective tissue hours to break down before the meat dries out, a job that grilling's fierce direct heat is far too quick to do.
Q 20George Stephen built the first Weber kettle grill from two sheet-metal halves normally used to make what?
Buoys
Buoys were being made in the shop where he worked; the story goes that his first fire died for lack of air until a neighbour had him punch holes in the lid, and the round grill was soon nicknamed Sputnik.
Hank Hill of King of the Hill works at Strickland Propane in Arlen, Texas; the show's writers went to Texas with reporters' notebooks and called on real propane dealers to learn the trade.
Q 24What was a traditional Japanese hibachi, literally a 'fire bowl' of glowing charcoal, originally used for?
Heating a room
Heating a room, or at least the hands held over it, was the hibachi's job, with a kettle sometimes set on top; the tabletop grill sold under the name in America borrows only the word.
Q 25Which future president's 1769 diary records going 'to a Barbecue' in Alexandria?
George Washington
George Washington also won eight shillings at cards that day, his ledger shows, and four years later his diary records going to 'a Barbicue of my own giving' near Mount Vernon.
Q 26The OED's earliest use of 'barbecue' as a verb is in a 1661 book about which island, newly seized from Spain?
Jamaica
Jamaica Viewed, by the soldier-turned-clergyman Edmund Hickeringill, used the word of supposed cannibals whose victims' flesh was 'forthwith Barbacu'd and eat', so its English debut had nothing to do with a cookout.
Q 27In Paul Hogan's 1980s tourism ads for Australia, what did he promise to slip onto the barbie for visitors?
An extra shrimp
An extra shrimp was a concession to American ears: Australians say prawn and wanted that word in the script, but the US team insisted, and the line became shorthand for Australia abroad.
Q 28South Africa's National Braai Day shares 24 September, KwaZulu-Natal's Shaka Day, with which public holiday?
Heritage Day
Heritage Day was a compromise: the new Parliament's public holidays bill left Shaka Day off the list, the Inkatha Freedom Party objected, and the date was kept as a day for every South African culture.
Q 29At an Argentine asado, what is the grill itself called?
Parrilla
Parrilla names both the iron grill and the steakhouses built around one, which is why Buenos Aires restaurant guides send visitors to 'a parrilla' for dinner; the cook who tends it is the asador.
Q 30Which two native Caribbean ingredients form the heart of a jerk marinade?
Allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers
Allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers grow wild in the island hills where the Maroons, Africans who escaped slavery, are said to have cooked wild pig in buried pits so that no smoke gave their camps away.