60 free Thai Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Traditional Thai cuisine balances which four flavours?
Sweet, sour, salty and spicy
Deep-frying, stir-frying and steaming were all methods borrowed from Chinese cooking.
Q 02Which Thai dish ranked highest, at number four, in CNN Travel's 2011 'World's 50 Best Foods'?
Tom yum kung
Pad thai came fifth and som tam sixth, giving Thailand three of the top six.
Q 03In the traditional four categories of Thai cooking, the word 'yam' refers to which kind of dish?
Spicy salads
The other three are tom (boiled), tam (pounded) and kaeng, the curries; frying and steaming were later Chinese imports.
Q 04Which now-essential Thai ingredient only arrived from the Americas in the 16th or 17th century?
Chili peppers
Before chillies, Thai cooks used black pepper, long pepper and Sichuan pepper for heat.
Q 05Thai desserts like foi thong (golden egg threads) adapt recipes from which European country's cuisine?
Portugal
The dishes are credited to Maria Guyomar de Pinha, a woman of Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali descent who married a Greek adviser to King Narai.
Q 06Tables and chairs entered Thai dining as part of a Westernisation drive under which king?
Mongkut
Fork and spoon followed a generation later; today Thais push food with the fork in the left hand into the spoon in the right.
Q 07Chopsticks are mainly used in Thailand for what?
Chinese-style noodle soups
Even stir-fried noodles such as pad thai and pad see ew are eaten with fork and spoon in the Thai fashion.
Q 08In Isan and northern Thailand, sticky rice is rolled into balls and used as what?
An edible utensil for dipping
By custom only the right hand is used to shape the balls, which are then dipped into side dishes.
Q 09What is Thailand's prized fragrant rice, khao hom mali, called in English?
Jasmine
Thai Red Cargo rice, an unpolished long grain with a reddish-brown husk, is nuttier and chewier by comparison.
Q 10Kapi, indispensable for Thai curry pastes, is made from what?
Fermented ground shrimp and salt
A French visitor in 1687 described it as a mustard-like sauce made of 'crayfish corrupted'.
Q 11Palm sugar, the traditional sweetener in Thai cooking, is made from the sap of what?
Borassus palms
Lime and tamarind supply the sour notes that balance it.
Q 12Which herb, 'distinctively redolent of cloves' with purple-tinged stems, perfumes green curry?
Thai basil
The basil that stars in the stir-fry phat kaphrao is a different plant altogether.
Q 13The blue colour in some Thai sweets and rice comes from the flowers of which plant?
Butterfly pea
Banana flowers and the blossoms of Sesbania grandiflora are eaten as vegetables in salads and curries.
Q 21Red 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 22Thai yellow curry, kaeng kari, is most typically served with chicken or beef and which starchy vegetable?
Potatoes
Its spice mix of cumin, turmeric and fenugreek is Indian-influenced, and it is eaten with rice or the round noodles khanom chin.
Q 23Massaman curry's use of cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg reflects roots in which religious community?
Muslim
Pork versions are rare and are not eaten by observant Thai Muslims; chicken simmered with peanuts is the classic form.
Q 14Which Thai province, host of the World Durian Festival, grows half of Thailand's durians?
Chanthaburi
Thailand was the world's top durian exporter in 2018, and China bought about 90 percent of its fresh durian exports in 2021.
Q 15Durian's smell has led hotels and public transport in Singapore and which Thai city to ban it?
Bangkok
The species name Durio zibethinus comes from the Italian for civet, whose musk the odour reminded people of.
Q 16What is Thailand's most sought-after durian cultivar, prized for creamy flesh and small seeds?
Mon Thong
Chanee resists Phytophthora infection best, while Kan Yao is prized for its longer sweet-but-odourless window.
Q 17The popular pad thai origin story credits which prime minister with promoting noodles during a rice shortage?
Plaek Phibunsongkhram
Food writer Kasma Loha-unchit counters that Thai Chinese immigrants invented it, arguing a dish named 'Thai' in Thailand betrays a non-Thai origin.
Q 18The Thai word kuai tiao, for rice noodles, is borrowed from which Chinese dialect?
Teochew
Its cousins include kuyteav in Cambodia, hu tieu in Vietnam and kway teow in Malaysia and Singapore.
Q 19How many Thai restaurants worldwide did Thailand's 2001 Global Thai Restaurant Company aim to open?
3,000
The push nearly tripled the number of Thai restaurants globally within seventeen years.
Q 20The 'wan' (sweet) in the Thai name of kaeng khiao wan curry actually refers to what?
The particular shade of the dish
The colour comes from fresh green chillies, and the curry tends to be more pungent than the milder red curries.
Q 24Green papaya salad, som tam in Thai, is believed to have been created by which people?
Lao
It spread through Thailand from Isan, where the population is largely ethnic Lao; the papaya itself came from the Americas in the 17th century.
Q 25The 'tam' in som tam refers to what preparation method?
Pounding in a mortar
Across the Mekong the dish is called tam mak hoong, literally 'pounded papaya'.
Q 26Which historian traces the origins of tom yum back to a sour prawn soup from India?
Giles Milton
In Thailand the two main styles are tom yam nam khon, creamy, and tom yam nam sai, clear.
Q 27Tom kha kai means "chicken galangal soup", but the earliest recorded version (c.1890) used which bird?
Duck
Chicken later took over, and shrimp versions are called tom kha kung.
Q 28Galangal, the rhizome that flavours tom kha and tom yum, belongs to which plant family?
Ginger
Greater galangal, Alpinia galanga, is also known as Siamese ginger; some Thai cooks substitute ordinary ginger.
Q 29Northern Thai khao soi is thought to have come via which caravan traders from Yunnan?
Chin Haw
Because of those halal origins it is still usually made with chicken or beef, never pork, and it is one of the few northern dishes using coconut milk.
Q 30Phat kaphrao, a popular Thai dish, is meat stir-fried with garlic, chilli and which herb?
Holy basil
It arose around the reign of Rama VII when Chinese immigrants sold it in restaurants, and is often topped with a fried egg.