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49 free Bacon trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Bacon trivia questions with answers. Bacon has its own holidays, its own festivals and its own mayonnaise, so it can certainly carry its own trivia quiz. Forty questions cover the cuts (streaky, back, jowl, collar), how curing and smoking work, where the word comes from, the medieval flitch that gave us 'bringing home the bacon', the world's bacon styles from peameal to guanciale, and the American bacon mania that produced the Bacon Explosion and the Baconator. It starts easy and works up to genuinely obscure food history. Use it solo, at a brunch, or as a food round on quiz night; difficulty ratings are shown so you can pick your battles. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on bacon, curing and the dishes involved, and each question carries its source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01American-style 'streaky' bacon comes from which part of the pig?
The belly
The alternating layers of fat and muscle are what make it crisp; British and Irish cooks generally prefer the leaner back cut.
Q 02Which cut does British back bacon include that streaky bacon does not?
The loin
A back rasher carries a round of loin meat with a tail of belly attached, giving it that distinctive tadpole shape.
Q 03What do Americans call the cured, cooked pork loin cut that Canadians call back bacon?
Canadian
The name stuck after the product was first shipped from Toronto to New York City.
Q 04Ontario's peameal bacon is rolled in what?
Cornmeal
The coating was originally ground yellow peas, which gave the product its name; it is wet-cured and left unsmoked.
Q 05Guanciale, the Italian cured meat used in carbonara, is made from which part of the pig?
The jowl
The name comes from guancia, Italian for cheek; it is a speciality of Lazio and Umbria and is never smoked.
Q 06Which Italian bacon is a form of belly bacon sold either smoked or unsmoked?
Pancetta
It is often rolled into a tight cylinder and sliced thin, or diced into cubes for soffritto.
Q 07Cottage bacon is made from lean meat taken from which part of the pig?
The boneless shoulder
It is usually tied into an oval shape and sliced into rounds, which is why it looks more like ham than rashers.
Q 08Which cut is 'collar bacon' taken from?
Near the head
It is a fattier British cut from the back of the neck, cheaper than back bacon and popular for boiling joints.
Q 09What are the two basic ways of preserving pork to make bacon?
Brining and salting
Wet curing means injecting or soaking in brine; dry curing means rubbing with salt, which takes longer but loses less water.
Q 10Which additives in bacon brine speed up curing and stabilise the pink colour?
Nitrites and nitrates
The nitrite breaks down into nitric oxide, which binds to the iron in myoglobin and fixes the colour; it also stops botulism.
Q 11Curing salt is dyed pink to stop it being mistaken for table salt. What is it commonly called?
Prague powder
It is ordinary sodium chloride blended with sodium nitrite; the pink is a warning, not the source of the meat's colour.
Q 12Under USDA rules, bacon cured with nitrites from celery or beets must be labelled how?
Uncured
The regulation only recognises synthetic nitrites as a 'cure', so the 'uncured' packet often contains just as much nitrite as the regular one.
Q 13Smoking bacon can take up to how long?
Eighteen hours
American producers favour hickory, mesquite or applewood; the length depends on how intense a flavour is wanted.
Q 21'Macon', introduced across Britain during wartime rationing, is bacon-style cured meat made from what?
Mutton
It was historically a Scottish product, and by most accounts nobody missed it when the war ended.
Q 22Vegetarian bacon is usually made from marinated strips of textured soy protein or which fermented food?
Tempeh
The product goes by 'facon', 'veggie bacon' or 'vacon', and none of the names has caught on.
Q 23How are commercial bacon bits typically cooked?
In continuous microwave ovens
Imitation bits are made from textured vegetable protein with artificial flavouring, which is why so many salad-bar toppings are technically vegan.
Q 14What is the unsmoked kind called in Britain?
Green
The name refers to its uncooked, unsmoked state rather than its colour, though the fat is paler than on smoked rashers.
Q 15Roughly what share of bacon is sold as rashers?
70%
The rest goes out as slab bacon, lardons, joints and diced pieces for cooking.
Q 16What does the Proto-Germanic root of the word 'bacon' mean?
Back meat
In Middle English 'bacoun' meant any pork at all; the modern narrow sense came later.
Q 17In which county did John Harris open the world's first bacon processing plant in the 1770s?
Wiltshire
The Calne factory gave its name to the Wiltshire cure, a mild brine method still used across Britain.
Q 18The Dunmow Flitch Trials award a side of bacon to couples who can prove what?
They have been happily married for a year and a day
The custom is traced to 1104 and Little Dunmow Priory, and Chaucer alludes to it in The Wife of Bath's Prologue.
Q 19Who sits on the jury at the modern Dunmow Flitch Trials?
Six maidens and six bachelors
Winning couples are carried shoulder-high in the ancient Flitch Chair; losers walk behind the empty chair with a consolation gammon.
Q 20Since the Second World War, how often have the Dunmow Flitch Trials been held?
Every leap year
The custom was revived in 1855 after Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Custom of Dunmow, and settled into its four-year rhythm after the Second World War.
Q 24By roughly what percentage does regular processed-meat consumption raise colorectal cancer risk, per WHO's 2015 finding?
18%
The IARC placed processed meat in its highest evidence category, alongside tobacco, though the absolute risk increase is far smaller.
Q 25How many calories are in a teaspoon of bacon grease?
38
Rendered bacon fat was saved in tins for cooking and, during the Second World War, collected to make glycerine for explosives.
Q 26Which parasitic roundworm was the traditional reason bacon had to be treated or thoroughly cooked?
Trichinella
Trichinosis in commercial pork is now vanishingly rare in most developed countries thanks to feed rules and freezing.
Q 27In a Smithfield survey, what share of Americans said they would support bacon as the 'national food'?
65%
US bacon sales climbed 9.5 percent in 2013 to an all-time high of nearly $4 billion.
Q 28The Bacon Explosion, an internet-famous barbecue dish, is bacon wrapped around what?
Two pounds of sausage
Two pounds of woven bacon around two pounds of sausage; it was created by the BBQ Addicts blog and went viral in 2008.
Q 29Which fast-food chain introduced the Baconator in 2007?
Wendy's
Two quarter-pound patties, two slices of cheese and six strips of bacon; a Son of Baconator with smaller patties followed.
Q 30How many strips of bacon are on a Baconator?
Six
The full-size double comes to about 930 calories, before fries.