Chili Trivia
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49 free Chili trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Chili trivia questions with answers. Chili trivia in both senses of the word. Half the questions are about the dish - the San Antonio chili queens, the 1893 World's Fair stand, William Gebhardt's chili powder, Texas making it the state dish, the beans argument, Terlingua's cook-offs, Cincinnati's five-way over spaghetti and Skyline's bank-vault recipe, Frito pie. The other half is about the peppers - where they came from, why Columbus called them peppers, Wilbur Scoville's tasting panel, why birds don't feel the burn and milk beats water, jalapenos in space, Tabasco's little red stick, Hatch and 'Red or green?', ghost peppers, Carolina Reapers and Pepper X. Easy questions any chili-night guest can answer come first; the later ones will test the person who brings their own hot sauce. Perfect for a cook-off round or a Super Bowl party. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and carries its source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does 'con carne' literally mean in Spanish?
With meat
With meat: in Spanish, 'chile' on its own just means the pepper, so the stew needed the extra words; English later dropped them and let plain 'chili' mean the dish.
Q 02Which animal appears on every bottle of Huy Fong's sriracha, the chili sauce with the green cap?
A rooster
A rooster marks the sauce David Tran began making in Los Angeles after fleeing Vietnam; he named his company Huy Fong after the freighter that carried him out.
Q 03The 'chili queens' who sold bowls of chili from open-air stands were famous in which Texas city?
San Antonio
San Antonio's chili queens served plaza crowds from dusk until dawn for decades, until the city health department ordered the stands out in 1937 and closed them for good in the early 1940s.
Q 04A Texas chili stand introduced the dish to visitors from across America at which 1893 event?
Chicago's Columbian Exposition
Chicago's Columbian Exposition is where chili historians date the dish's leap from Texas speciality to national craze, thanks to the bowls sold at that one stand.
Q 05Which New Braunfels café owner began selling his own chili powder in 1894, after running dried peppers through a meat grinder?
William Gebhardt
William Gebhardt could get fresh chilies only part of the year, so he dried and ground them to keep chili on his menu; Fort Worth grocer D. C. Pendery was selling a rival powder by then.
Q 06Besides ground chilies, which spices typically go into an American 'chili seasoning' blend?
Cumin, garlic and onion
Cumin, garlic and onion come ready-mixed because the powder was built for one dish: the first commercial blends were sold in 1890s Texas to season pots of chili con carne.
Q 07Kitchen lore blames the seeds, but which part of a chili pepper actually makes its capsaicin?
The white pith
The white pith that holds the seeds makes the capsaicin; the seeds themselves produce none and merely soak some up from the tissue they hang on.
Q 08Which car maker was among the founders of the first Terlingua, Texas chili cook-off in 1967?
Carroll Shelby
Carroll Shelby co-owned the ghost town and the ranch land around it; by his own account he and his partner wanted to sell, and the cook-off was their publicist's idea.
Q 09Terlingua, the Texas ghost town that hosts chili championships, grew up around mines digging cinnabar for which metal?
Mercury
Mercury, or quicksilver, kept Terlingua busy until the Chisos Mining Company went bankrupt in 1942 and the miners drifted away; the chili cook-offs later brought the crowds back.
Q 10Cincinnati chili was developed in 1922 by immigrant brothers from which region?
Macedonia
Macedonia was home to the Kiradjieff brothers, who are said to have found few takers for Balkan cooking in Cincinnati and so recast a spiced stew as 'chili' to widen their trade.
Q 11Over what is Cincinnati chili traditionally served?
Spaghetti
Spaghetti under the chili is treated like a casserole in Cincinnati: locals cut each bite with the side of the fork, and twirling the noodles is frowned upon.
Q 12Original Tabasco sauce is made from just three ingredients: tabasco peppers, salt and what?
Vinegar
Vinegar goes in last: the salted pepper mash first spends up to three years in old bourbon barrels, then is blended with vinegar for about a month before bottling.
Q 13Which ingredient is Cincinnati chili widely rumoured to contain, a myth the city's chili parlors deny?
Chocolate
Chocolate turns up in many copycat recipes, but the historian of the dish found no Cincinnati chili parlor that uses it, and the biggest chain says its recipe has none.
Q 21Who bred the Carolina Reaper, Guinness's hottest chili from 2013 until 2023?
Ed Currie
Ed Currie tested hundreds of hybrids over about 12 years before crossing a fiercely hot pepper from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent with a superhot from South Asia.
Q 22Which chili was the first certified above 1,000,000 Scoville units, in 2007?
The ghost pepper
The ghost pepper is hot enough that conservationists in Assam smear it on fences to turn back wild elephants, and Indian defence scientists have packed it into hand grenades.
Q 23A poblano pepper that has been dried is sold under which name?
Ancho
Ancho means 'wide' in Spanish: the poblano dries into a broad, flat, heart-shaped pod, which is often ground into chili powder.
Q 14Which Cincinnati chili chain did Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides and his sons open in 1949?
Skyline Chili
Skyline Chili was named, the company says, for the city view from its first restaurant; its Greek-born founder built the sauce on his mother's recipes.
Q 15Which eatery is one claimed birthplace of Frito pie?
A Woolworth's in Santa Fe
A Woolworth's in Santa Fe is where Teresa Hernandez is said to have dished it up in the 1960s; a rival Texas story credits the mother of Fritos' founder instead.
Q 16Wilbur Scoville devised his chili heat test in 1912 while working for a Detroit drug company in which profession?
Pharmacist
Pharmacist Scoville had no instrument sensitive enough to measure a pepper's bite, so at Parke-Davis he relied on the tongues of a panel of tasters instead.
Q 17Scoville's original heat test diluted pepper extract in what?
Sugar water
Sugar water was added until three of five tasters felt nothing; the amount of dilution became the rating, so a 5,000-unit pepper needed diluting 5,000 times.
Q 18Which of these scores zero on the Scoville heat scale?
Bell pepper
Bell pepper belongs to the same species as the jalapeño and cayenne, Capsicum annuum, yet has no heat at all for the scale to measure.
Q 19How hot is pure capsaicin on the Scoville scale?
16 million
16 million is the score of the pure compound, about six times the hottest chili on record, because a Scoville number counts how far a sample must be diluted before the burn fades.
Q 20Which chili took Guinness's 'hottest' title from the Carolina Reaper in 2023, rated about 2.69 million Scoville units?
Pepper X
Pepper X was grown in secret for a decade by the same South Carolina breeder who created the Reaper, and its pods and seeds are not sold.
Q 24Why did Columbus's crew call the Capsicum fruits 'peppers'?
They were pungent like black pepper
They were pungent like black pepper, the spice the voyage had hoped to reach, so the name was reused, which is why English has one word for two unrelated plants.
Q 25The word 'chili' reached English through Spanish from which indigenous American language?
Nahuatl
Nahuatl, the Aztecs' language, called the pepper 'chilli', the very spelling British English still uses; Spanish trimmed it to 'chile' and American English to 'chili'.
Q 26Why can birds happily eat the hottest chilies?
Their heat receptors ignore capsaicin
Their heat receptors ignore capsaicin, which suits the plant: birds swallow the fruit and scatter the seeds unharmed, while the burn keeps seed-destroying mammals away.
Q 27Why does milk soothe a chili burn better than water?
Its casein binds capsaicin
Its casein binds capsaicin; in a Penn State trial skim milk soothed the burn as well as whole milk, so the fat is not what does the work.
Q 28Which medical product uses capsaicin?
A pain-relief skin patch
A pain-relief skin patch carries so much capsaicin that putting it on burns: only clinicians may apply it, and they can numb the skin with an anaesthetic first.
Q 29What is a chipotle?
A smoke-dried ripe jalapeno
A smoke-dried ripe jalapeno starts as a pod left on the plant until it is deep red and losing moisture; smoking, an old way of preserving peppers, finishes the job.
Q 30The jalapeno is named after which city, the capital of Veracruz?
Xalapa
Xalapa, also spelled Jalapa, gave the pepper its name but not its harvest: jalapeños are no longer grown commercially around the city, and the crop now comes from other regions.