Ethiopian Food
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49 free Ethiopian Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ethiopian food is built on a single giant pancake. Injera, the sour teff flatbread, doubles as plate and cutlery, torn with the right hand to scoop up wats, stews that all begin with a mountain of red onion and most of which glow with berbere. Because the Orthodox Church prescribes fasts on every Wednesday and Friday and for all of Lent, a huge share of the repertoire is naturally vegan. These 49 questions cover the staples and the spice cupboard: teff and why white teff costs more, ersho starter and fermentation times, berbere versus mitmita, niter kibbeh, doro wat as national dish, tibs, kinche and the salads. Then the regional dishes: Gurage kitfo and gored gored, ayibe cheese, gomen kitfo for Meskel, enset and kocho, Sidama wassa and borasaame, breakfast fatira, genfo and ful. And the drinks: tej and tella, areki, Ambo water, the jebena, three rounds of coffee with salt or butter, and boiled coffee leaves in the south. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a food-and-drink quiz round.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Injera is traditionally made from the flour of which grain?
Teff
Teff. Its seeds are less than a millimetre across, so small that a single handful is enough to sow a whole field, which suited farmers who were often on the move.
Q 02The bubbly little holes that cover the top of an injera are known by what name?
Eyes
Eyes. They are bubbles that set as the batter cooks, and they earn their keep at the table by soaking up the sauce of whatever is spooned on top.
Q 03With which hand do Ethiopians traditionally eat?
Right
Right. A torn piece of injera does the work of cutlery, pinching up each bite of stew.
Q 04Shiro, the everyday stew of Ethiopian fasting days, is made from which flour?
Chickpea flour
Chickpea flour. The dried legumes are ground and blended with spices in advance, then whisked into water and simmered until thick, which keeps shiro on the table through Lent and other meatless fasts.
Q 05Which church's fasting rules explain why so many Ethiopian dishes are vegan?
Orthodox Tewahedo
Orthodox Tewahedo. Its calendar sets about 250 fast days, some 180 of them kept by ordinary believers, when no animal products may be eaten and the day's one meal waits until the afternoon.
Q 06Which two weekdays are fast days for observant Ethiopian Christians through almost the whole year?
Wednesday and Friday
Wednesday and Friday. Wednesday recalls the council that condemned Jesus and Friday the Crucifixion, and the weekly fast is lifted only for the fifty days after Easter.
Q 07What is the woven basket table on which a traditional Ethiopian meal is served called?
Mesob
Mesob. Its tall pointed lid is lifted away at mealtime to reveal the tray of food, and between meals the same basket keeps the household's injera.
Q 08Kocho, a staple bread of southern Ethiopia, is made from which plant?
False banana (enset)
False banana (enset). It looks like a banana tree, yet its fruit is inedible: people eat the starchy stem and root instead, pulped and left to ferment underground for months before baking.
Q 09Quanta, spiced and left to air-dry, is an Ethiopian take on what?
Beef jerky
Beef jerky. It is chewed as a snack just as it is, or dropped back into a pot of spicy sauce, where the dried strips soften into a meal.
Q 10Which European country briefly occupied Ethiopia in the 1930s, leaving a lasting mark on its menus?
Italy
Italy. The occupiers were gone within a few years but pasta stayed: it is common even in rural areas, and spaghetti is often served straight on top of injera.
Q 11What is considered the national dish of Ethiopia?
Doro wat
Doro wat. It is the dish that ends the long fasts: after weeks without meat, families gather at Easter and Christmas around a pot of this slow-cooked chicken stew.
Q 12Which chilli-based spice blend gives most Ethiopian red stews their heat and colour?
Berbere
Berbere. Its fire is a New World import: chilli peppers come from the Americas and reached Ethiopia only a few centuries ago, so the country's signature red stews are younger than they look.
Q 13Which staple of Ethiopian cooking is butter simmered with spices and then strained?
Niter kibbeh
Niter kibbeh. Straining out the milk solids, as with Indian ghee, gives a pure fat that keeps far longer than fresh butter, with the aroma of the spices sealed in.
Q 21Azifa, an Ethiopian salad usually served cold, is based on what?
Lentils
Lentils. Green ones are cooked, then tossed with raw onion and green chilli and left to cool, a sharp counterpoint to the hot stews beside it.
Q 22Awaze, served with meat dishes in Ethiopia, is what kind of condiment?
A fiery chilli paste
A fiery chilli paste. Cooks blend ground red chillies and spices into a paste, and it does double duty: a dip at the table and a seasoning for meat in the kitchen.
Q 23What is fir-fir, a favourite Ethiopian breakfast?
Shredded injera mixed with stew
Q 14In the Ethiopian custom of gursha, how does one diner honour another at the table?
By hand-feeding them a bite
By hand-feeding them a bite. The morsel is wrapped in injera and placed straight in the other person's mouth, and one gursha is never enough: the gesture is repeated or promptly returned.
Q 15Which yellow spice takes the place of the hot red blend in a mild Ethiopian alicha wat?
Turmeric
Turmeric. The name works as a heat warning in reverse: on a menu, a plain wat is made with the fiery chilli blend, while anything called alicha is made without it.
Q 16What is the first step in making almost any Ethiopian wat?
Cook down chopped onions
Cook down chopped onions. Unusually, they go into a dry pot with no fat at all and are stirred until their moisture is gone; only then is butter or oil added, and the collapsed onions thicken the sauce.
Q 17Ethiopia's festive chicken stew is traditionally served with which whole ingredient simmered in the sauce?
Hard-boiled eggs
Hard-boiled eggs. They go in peeled but whole for the last minutes of cooking, so the dark, spicy sauce stains and seasons them.
Q 18What is tibs?
Sautéed meat with vegetables
Sautéed meat with vegetables. Where a wat is a slow, saucy stew, tibs is fried fast with onion and green chilli and may reach the table with no sauce at all.
Q 19Legend says an Ethiopian herder named Kaldi discovered coffee after which animals turned frisky on its berries?
Goats
Goats. In the tale Kaldi tried the red berries himself, then carried them to a nearby monastery, where, in one telling, the abbot brewed them to stay awake through evening prayers.
Q 20Kinche, a cheap everyday Ethiopian breakfast porridge, is made from what?
Cracked wheat, oats or barley
Cracked wheat, oats or barley. The grain is simply boiled soft in water or milk and finished with seasoned butter, a meal so quick and cheap that it does for supper as well as breakfast.
Shredded injera mixed with stew. It is a thrifty breakfast: yesterday's injera, often dried, is torn up and stirred into leftover wat, then eaten, as usual, with more injera.
Q 24The top of ambasha, an Ethiopian bread, is decorated to resemble what?
A spoked wheel
A spoked wheel. Just before the loaf goes into the oven a knife carves the pattern into the dough; the bread comes from the Tigrinya-speaking north, where it is called himbasha.
Q 25What is kolo?
Roasted barley or wheat with peanuts
Street vendors sell it in paper cones; it is also served with coffee.
Q 26What is tej?
A honey wine
A honey wine. It began as a drink of emperors and their courts and ended up with bars of its own: a tej bet is a drinking house devoted to it.
Q 27Which leaf, used much as hops are in Europe, flavours Ethiopia's home-brewed tella beer?
Gesho
Gesho. Sprigs of this native buckthorn both flavour the brew and help it ferment, and the same plant goes into Ethiopia's other great home-made drink.
Q 28Areki, known in Ethiopia as katikala too, is what kind of drink?
A home-distilled spirit
A home-distilled spirit. It starts from much the same grain mash as home-brewed beer, but distilling makes it probably Ethiopia's strongest drink.
Q 29Kitfo, a traditional Ethiopian dish, consists of what?
Raw minced beef in spiced butter
Raw minced beef in spiced butter. The dish comes from the Gurage people, and a diner can order it three ways: fully raw, just warmed through (leb leb) or cooked.
Q 30Kitfo gets its heat from which orange-red Ethiopian spice powder?
Mitmita
Mitmita. Built on small bird's eye chillies with cardamom and cloves, it is hotter than the everyday red blend and is also set out dry, for dipping morsels of meat.