Brazilian Food
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46 free Brazilian Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Brazilian food is five cuisines wearing one flag: Portuguese sugar and salt cod, African palm oil and black-eyed peas, Indigenous manioc, tucupi and guaraná, Italian pasta and pizza, and the Japanese and Arab snacks of São Paulo. The national dish is a bean stew, the national cocktail is built on cane spirit, and the most famous sweet was invented to win an election. These 46 questions cover the country region by region: feijoada and brigadeiro, pão de queijo from Minas Gerais, moqueca from Bahia and Espírito Santo, acarajé, vatapá and caruru, churrasco, picanha and the rules of rodízio, açaí bowls and the numbing jambu of Pará, pequi rice in Goiás, chimarrão in the gaúcho south, and the snacks that hold it all together: coxinha, pastel, quibe and bolinhos de bacalhau. Easy questions cover the national dish, the national cocktail and cassava; the expert tier asks about the Kikongo root of quindim, the Sateré-Mawé word for guaraná, the buffalo in barreado, the clay pot of Goiabeiras and the island that sent Brazil its first sugar cane. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation. Play it solo or print it for a food night.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bean-and-meat stew is considered Brazil's national dish?
Feijoada
Feijoada: legend says enslaved cooks invented it from discarded pork cuts, but food historians trace the stew to Portugal's bean-and-meat dishes, remade in Brazil with native black beans.
Q 02What is Brazil's national cocktail?
Caipirinha
Caipirinha: Brazilian law protects the recipe. A federal decree reserves the name for cachaça mixed with lime and sugar, and the same drink made with vodka is called a caipiroska.
Q 03Cachaça, Brazil's native liquor, is distilled from what?
Fermented cane juice
Fermented cane juice, not the molasses used for most rum, is what cachaça is distilled from; even so, US labels had to call it rum until a 2013 rule recognised cachaça as a distinct Brazilian product.
Q 04Brigadeiros are chocolate truffles made from cocoa powder, butter and what?
Condensed milk
Condensed milk, cooked with cocoa and butter until fudgy. Supporters of Brigadier Eduardo Gomes made and sold the sweets at his 1945 presidential rallies; he lost, but the candy kept his rank as its name.
Q 05Which grape-like Brazilian fruit grows straight out of the trunk of its tree?
Jabuticaba
Jabuticaba: once picked the berries start to ferment within days, so fresh ones rarely reach markets far from where they grow, and the fruit is often made into jam, wine or liqueur.
Q 06Kibe and esfiha, now staples of Brazilian snack bars, arrived with immigrants from which two countries?
Lebanon and Syria
Lebanon and Syria: immigrants who came from the late 1800s made the snacks everyday Brazilian food, yet Habib's, the fast-food chain built on cheap esfihas, was founded by a man born in Portugal with no Arab roots.
Q 07Pão de queijo originated in which Brazilian state?
Minas Gerais
Minas Gerais: wheat was scarce in colonial Brazil, so cooks there baked with cassava starch instead, which is why pão de queijo is naturally gluten-free.
Q 08Coxinha, the teardrop-shaped chicken croquette, literally means what?
Little thigh
Coxinha means 'little thigh' (coxa is thigh); the dough is shaped like a drumstick, and legend ties it to a son of Princess Isabel who would eat only that cut.
Q 09Moqueca is a Brazilian stew built around what?
Fish or shrimp
Fish or shrimp: the stew is often traced to an Indigenous way of cooking fish wrapped in leaves over a fire, though today it simmers with tomato, onion and coriander in a clay pot.
Q 10Espírito Santo's moqueca skips Bahia's dendê oil and gets its colour from which spice?
Annatto
Annatto: capixaba cooks tint olive oil with the seeds, called urucum, and leave out the palm oil and coconut milk that African cooking brought to Bahia's version, so theirs is the lighter stew.
Q 11Which purple Amazon palm fruit is eaten unsweetened in Pará with fish and manioc flour?
Açaí
Açaí: along the Amazon it is a savoury staple, mashed into a thick pulp and eaten with fish; the sweet frozen bowl with granola and banana is the southern version that took off in Rio.
Q 12Which Amazon fruit, first domesticated by the Sateré-Mawé, splits open to look like an eyeball?
Guaraná
Guaraná: in the Sateré-Mawé myth the first plant grew from the buried eye of a dead child, and today its seeds go into Brazil's soft drinks and into energy drinks around the world.
Q 13Picanha, the prized cut of Brazilian barbecue, is known in the UK as what?
Rump cap
Rump cap: the cut was long overlooked as just part of the rump, and the steakhouse owner Fuad Zegaib, of Dinho's, claimed to be the first to put it on the grill by itself.
Q 21Pastéis are believed to have evolved from which dish adapted by Asian immigrants?
Fried spring rolls
Fried spring rolls: Chinese immigrants are credited with adapting them, and Japanese newcomers, some opening stalls to pass as Chinese during the Second World War, carried the pastel to markets everywhere.
Q 22Which drink is the classic partner to a pastel at a Brazilian street market?
Caldo de cana
Caldo de cana, fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, is the classic match; a market pastel is such a ritual that Brazilians call campaign time 'pastel season', after the politicians photographed eating one.
Q 23The dessert Romeu e Julieta pairs cheese with a paste made from which fruit?
Guava
Q 14Traditional churrasco picanha is seasoned with just what?
Coarse sea salt
Coarse sea salt: purists put nothing else on the cut, and they leave the thick layer of fat on so that it keeps the beef moist as it roasts over charcoal.
Q 15In which Brazilian steakhouse service style do waiters circulate with skewers of meat for one fixed price?
Rodízio
Rodízio: in one origin story, a roadside steakhouse owner in the 1960s calmed a room of impatient diners by sending every skewer round to every table, and the habit stuck.
Q 16Pudim de leite, a staple Brazilian dessert, is a version of which classic?
Crème caramel
Crème caramel: Brazil's version grew out of Portuguese flan and is baked in a water bath, chilled and flipped so the caramel runs down; even its name is borrowed, from the English word pudding.
Q 17Farofa, a staple side at Brazilian barbecues, is what?
Toasted manioc meal
Toasted manioc meal: the coarse flour is fried in butter or oil with bacon, onion or olives for crunch, and it gave Brazil the word farofeiro, a day-tripper who brings a packed lunch to the beach.
Q 18Which creamy Bahian paste blends bread or ground nuts with dried shrimp, coconut milk and dendê oil?
Vatapá
Vatapá: enslaved West Africans brought the dish to Bahia, where it is still prepared as a ritual food for Candomblé ceremonies as well as ladled out at street stalls.
Q 19Acarajé, the Bahian street snack, is a fried ball of which legume?
Black-eyed peas
Black-eyed peas: the fritter is West Africa's akara, and its Brazilian name is Yoruba too, akara plus the word for 'eat'; in Bahia it is both a Candomblé offering and a street snack.
Q 20Which Bahian spread of okra, dried shrimp and nuts in palm oil goes inside acarajé?
Caruru
Caruru: the stew is thought to descend from West African okra soups, okra itself being an African plant; in Bahia it is simmered down with the shrimp and nuts until thick enough to spread.
Guava: settlers are said to have used guava paste in place of Portugal's quince paste, and the name arrived only in the 1960s, from an advert that dressed comic-strip kids Mônica and Cebolinha as the lovers.
Q 24Quindim is a glistening yellow custard of sugar, egg yolks and what?
Ground coconut
Ground coconut: the Portuguese sweet it descends from was made with almonds, and enslaved cooks in colonial Bahia are thought to have swapped in the coconut that grew all around them.
Q 25Brazil's estrogonofe, a home favourite adapted from a Russian dish, is served over rice and topped with what?
Potato sticks
Potato sticks, called batata palha: Brazilian cooks also swapped the Russian recipe's sour cream for table cream and stirred in ketchup, and they often use chicken in place of the beef.
Q 26Pamonha, a festa junina staple, is a sweet or savoury paste boiled inside what?
Corn husks
Corn husks: the grated-corn paste is tied up in its own husks and boiled, and loudspeaker cars sell it street by street to a recorded 1970s jingle for the 'delicious pamonhas of Piracicaba'.
Q 27Pinhão, boiled and eaten in southern Brazil's winter, is the nut of which tree?
Araucaria
Araucaria: the endangered Paraná pine owes many of its seedlings to the azure jay, which wedges the seeds into the ground as a food store, the perfect start for a new tree.
Q 28What stops pequi eaters biting into the fruit's stone?
Tiny spines
Tiny spines: they lodge in the gums and palate and are hard to pull out, so the pungent yellow pulp is scraped off gently with the teeth; a few wild trees bear spineless stones.
Q 29Chimarrão, the drink associated with the gaúcho, is made from what?
Yerba mate
Yerba mate: chimarrão comes from Spanish cimarrón, 'wild', a word that also names cattle gone feral; it stuck to mate drunk bitter, with no sugar, from a gourd through a metal straw.
Q 30Pato no tucupi, Pará's famous duck dish, is the traditional lunch of which October procession in Belém?
Círio de Nazaré
Círio de Nazaré: one of the world's largest religious gatherings fills Belém on the second Sunday of October, and families then sit down to the duck, simmered in tucupi and topped with jambu.