Thai Food Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
55 free Thai Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Thai food trivia quiz covers the whole table, from the four flavour balance of sweet, sour, salty and spicy to the individual dishes that made Thai cuisine one of the most loved in the world. The easy questions handle the basics: what goes into pad thai and tom yum, which fruit is shredded for som tam, what makes green curry green, and how Thais actually eat (hint: not with chopsticks). The harder end is for cooks and travellers: the prime minister who promoted noodles during a rice shortage, why massaman curry tastes of cardamom and cinnamon, the Muslim caravan traders behind khao soi, the fermented fish that flavours Isan cooking, the housewife credited with inventing sriracha in Si Racha, the king who missed nam phrik so badly on his European tour, and the ski-goggled street cook who won a Michelin star. There are also questions on jasmine rice, sticky rice etiquette, durian bans and Thai iced tea. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Thai cuisine and its individual dishes and ingredients before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Thailand, world food and Asian cuisine quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Traditional Thai cuisine balances which four flavours?
Sweet, sour, salty and spicy
Sweet, sour, salty and spicy flavours are balanced across the whole meal, which is served all at once rather than in courses.
Q 02In CNN Travel's 2011 readers' poll of the world's 50 best foods, which Thai dish placed highest?
Tom yum kung
Tom yum kung placed fourth after more than 35,000 votes, a poll won by Indonesia's rendang rather than CNNGo's own pick, massaman curry.
Q 03In the traditional four categories of Thai cooking, the word 'yam' refers to which kind of dish?
Spicy salads
Spicy salads: yam literally means to mix, and a yam is made simply by tossing everything together.
Q 04The Thai spirit Mekhong is distilled from what?
Molasses
Molasses is distilled for Mekhong, which is then blended with Thai herbs and spices to give the spirit its flavour.
Q 05Thai golden egg-thread sweets adapt recipes from which European country's cuisine?
Portugal
Portugal: egg yolks mark these threads as an import, since Thai sweets with eggs in them were adapted from other food cultures.
Q 06Chopsticks are mainly used in Thailand for what?
Chinese-style noodle soups
Chinese-style noodle soups get chopsticks because chopsticks came to Thailand with Chinese migrants.
Q 07In Isan and northern Thailand, sticky rice is rolled into balls and used as what?
An edible utensil for dipping
An edible utensil for dipping, the ball is shaped with the right hand only, by custom, and Thais ate by hand like this long before spoons arrived.
Q 08What is Thailand's prized fragrant rice, khao hom mali, called in English?
Jasmine
Jasmine rice loses its popcorn-like aroma in storage, so connoisseurs seek out each year's freshly harvested 'new crop'.
Q 09Kapi, indispensable for Thai curry pastes, is made from what?
Fermented ground shrimp and salt
Fermented ground shrimp and salt make kapi, and since every traditional Thai curry paste contains it, vegetarian shops have to swap in substitutes.
Q 10Palm sugar, the traditional sweetener in Thai cooking, is made from the sap of what?
Borassus palms
Borassus palms are tapped for sugary sap from their flower clusters, which is boiled down into sugar or fermented into toddy, a palm wine.
Q 11Which herb, with an anise-like scent and purple stems, perfumes green curry?
Thai basil
Thai basil is added near the end, with the other garnishes, to give green curry its fragrance.
Q 12The blue colour in some Thai sweets and rice comes from the flowers of which plant?
Butterfly pea
Butterfly pea flowers make a blue tea that turns violet when lemon is squeezed in, a trick Thai hotels and spas serve as a welcome drink.
Q 13In Thai, farang means a Westerner, and it is also the everyday name for which fruit?
Guava
Guava shares the word, probably because it was a foreign fruit, carried to Asia from the Americas by European colonizers.
Q 21Northern Thailand's kaeng hang le, a pork curry, came from which country?
Myanmar
Myanmar's Burmese kings ruled northern Thailand's Lanna kingdom until the 1770s.
Q 22What did a sensor-packed robot, unveiled by Thailand's government in 2014, check Thai dishes for?
Authentic taste
Authentic taste was the goal after bad Thai meals abroad led Yingluck Shinawatra's government to push for standard Thai recipes.
Q 23Chang, one of Thailand's two best-known beer brands, is named after which animal?
Elephant
Elephant is chang in Thai, and the brewer carried its elephant logo onto Everton's Premier League shirts starting in 2004.
Q 14Which global energy drink grew out of Krating Daeng, a Thai tonic first sold to rural labourers?
Red Bull
Red Bull came about after Austrian marketer Dietrich Mateschitz found Krating Daeng eased his jet lag in Thailand and partnered with its creator, Chaleo Yoovidhya.
Q 15Which prime minister, who also renamed Siam as Thailand, is credited with popularising pad thai?
Plaek Phibunsongkhram
Plaek Phibunsongkhram's government pushed the dish as part of a nation-building drive to stir Thai national pride.
Q 16Thailand's early-2000s government drive to spread Thai restaurants abroad ran under what campaign name?
Kitchen of the World
Kitchen of the World came with state loans and training for Thais opening restaurants overseas, a way to sell more Thai exports and lure tourists.
Q 17What does 'wan', meaning sweet, describe in green curry's Thai name, kaeng khiao wan?
The particular shade of the dish
The particular shade of the dish, a mild creamy green, is what 'wan' describes, so green curry isn't meant to taste sweeter than other curries.
Q 18Red curry gets its colour from what?
Dried red spur chillies
Its Thai name kaeng phet literally means 'spicy curry', and the paste is traditionally pounded moist in a mortar.
Q 19Thai yellow curry, kaeng kari, is most typically served with chicken or beef and which starchy vegetable?
Potatoes
Potatoes: yet order kaeng lueang, literally 'yellow curry', in Thailand and you will get a different curry altogether.
Q 20Massaman curry's use of cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg reflects roots in which religious community?
Muslim
Muslim roots explain those spices, and a boat song attributed to King Rama II praises massaman curry.
Q 24Galangal, the rhizome that flavours tom kha soup, belongs to which plant family?
Ginger
Ginger's family also holds galangal, and tom kha cooks sometimes swap in plain ginger.
Q 25Northern Thai khao soi is thought to have come via which caravan traders from Yunnan?
Chin Haw
Chin Haw traders, Chinese Muslims from Yunnan, brought a noodle soup that local cooks later enriched with coconut milk, rare in northern Thai cooking.
Q 26Phat kaphrao, a popular Thai dish, is meat stir-fried with garlic, chilli and which herb?
Holy basil
Holy basil: diners who can't decide what to order often pick phat kaphrao, so it is jokingly called the 'out of ideas' dish.
Q 27Larb, the minced meat salad popular in Isan and northern Thailand, originated in which country?
Laos
Laos is larb's home, and the dish is said to be lucky partly because its name sounds like laap, a word for luck.
Q 28Pla ra, the pungent seasoning of Isan cooking, is made by fermenting fish with salt and what?
Rice bran or rice flour
The mixture sits in a closed container for at least six months and was already common food in the Ayutthaya kingdom.
Q 29Traditional Thai fish sauce, nam pla, is made by fermenting salted fish for about how long?
About a year
About a year, because enzymes from the fish's own gut and flesh, then salt-loving bacteria, only slowly break it down into sauce.
Q 30The Romans made a fish sauce comparable to Thai nam pla; what was it called?
Garum
Garum was so popular that a kosher version was made for Jewish Romans, and jars of it turned up in the ruins of Pompeii.