Greek Food Trivia
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50 free Greek Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Greek food is built on wheat, olive oil and wine, and this quiz works through the whole table. It starts with the classics everyone orders, feta, tzatziki, souvlaki and gyros, Greek salad and moussaka, and asks what is actually in them: which milk feta must be made from, what meat a real gyros uses, and why the village salad has no lettuce. Then it goes deeper into meze, pies, soups and sweets, from taramasalata on Clean Monday to magiritsa after the Easter midnight liturgy and the coin hidden in a New Year vasilopita. You will also meet the drinks (ouzo, tsipouro, retsina, Metaxa, the Thessaloniki-born frappé), the regions (Kalamata olives, Chios mastic, Santorini fava and Assyrtiko), and the history: the Mediterranean triad of ancient Greece, the first Greek cookbook printed on Syros in 1828, and Nikolaos Tselementes, the French-trained chef who put bechamel on moussaka and whose surname became the Greek word for a cookbook. Easy questions suit anyone who has eaten at a taverna; the expert tier asks about klephts, lucanica and Byzantine kokoretsi. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual dishes and drinks, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under EU rules, feta is a sheep's milk cheese that may be blended with a smaller share of which other milk?
Goat
Goat: it may make up no more than 30% of the milk, and since the EU protected the name in 2002, the cow's-milk versions long made in Denmark and Germany may not be sold there as feta.
Q 02In Greece itself, an authentic gyros is traditionally made with which meat?
Pork
Pork is the Greek standard, with chicken the usual alternative; the lamb or ground-beef gyro is what other countries serve, and one American dictionary still defines the dish as 'usually lamb'.
Q 03Which Greek street food takes its name from the word for a skewer?
Souvlaki
Souvlaki: around Athens the skewer on its own is usually called a kalamaki, 'little reed', while 'souvlaki' there can mean the whole pita wrap.
Q 04Which vegetable is mixed with strained yogurt and garlic to make tzatziki?
Cucumber
Cucumber: it is grated and then squeezed dry in a cloth, because any water left in it thins the yogurt and turns the dip runny.
Q 05Outside Greece, a 'Greek salad' is often bulked out with which ingredient that a traditional horiatiki leaves out?
Lettuce
Lettuce: horiatiki means 'village salad', a rustic plate of ripe tomato under a slab of feta, the kind of thing a farmer would have had to hand.
Q 06Which Greek dish did chef Nikolaos Tselementes give its modern form by adding a béchamel top?
Moussaka
Moussaka: Tselementes crowned the older dish with a French-style béchamel, and his recipe book became so standard that 'tselementes' is now a Greek word for a cookbook.
Q 07Besides ground meat, moussaka is usually based on which vegetable?
Aubergine
Aubergine: Greek cooks fry or bake the slices first and build them up in layers, whereas the Turkish dish of the same name braises them with tomato and minced meat.
Q 08Pastitsio, the Greek baked pasta dish with a béchamel top, takes its name from a word in which language?
Italian
Italian: a pasticcio is a baked pie of mixed ingredients, a hodge-podge, and the same word, passing through French, gave English 'pastiche'.
Q 09Spanakopita is a filo pie filled with cheese and which vegetable?
Spinach
Spinach: spanaki is its Greek name, and cooks wilt it and squeeze out the liquid before it goes between the sheets of filo with feta, eggs and herbs.
Q 10The paper-thin pastry filo takes its name from the Greek fyllo, meaning what?
Leaf
Leaf: the dough is stretched paper-thin and the sheets are stacked with butter or oil between them, so they bake into brittle, flaky layers.
Q 11Ouzo is a dry aperitif flavoured with what?
Anise
Anise: its oil dissolves in strong alcohol but not in water, which is why clear ouzo turns milky white the moment water or ice goes in.
Q 12Retsina owes its distinctive flavour to what?
Pine resin
Pine resin: ancient wine jars were sealed with it to keep the wine from spoiling, one explanation of how the taste caught on; today small pieces are added during fermentation instead.
Q 13Metaxa, the amber Greek spirit created in 1888, is a blend of brandy and what?
Muscat wine
Muscat wine: it is married with aged wine distillates and a secret mix of botanicals including rose petals, which is why naming rules no longer let Metaxa call itself a brandy.
Q 21Avgolemono, the sauce and soup base, is made by whisking broth with what two ingredients?
Egg and lemon
Egg and lemon: warm broth is whisked into the beaten mixture a little at a time, tempering it so the eggs thicken the soup instead of curdling.
Q 22Magiritsa, the soup eaten right after the Paschal midnight liturgy, is made from what?
Lamb offal
Lamb offal: the soup uses up the organs removed from the lamb that will be spit-roasted the next day, and it breaks the 40-day Lenten fast.
Q 23Taramasalata is a meze made from what?
Salted fish roe
Salted fish roe: cured cod or carp roe is whipped with bread or potato, oil and lemon; the real thing is beige, and the bright pink of shop tubs is added colouring.
Q 14Tsipouro, the pomace brandy of Thessaly and Epirus, was said to be first made by 14th-century monks where?
Mount Athos
Mount Athos: by tradition its monks, already winemakers, first distilled the spirit from what the winepress left behind, the skins and pips of the pressed grapes.
Q 15Frappé coffee, the foam-topped iced Nescafé drink, was invented in 1957 in which Greek city?
Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki: the story goes that at its 1957 trade fair a Nestlé employee, Dimitris Vakondios, couldn't find hot water for his instant coffee, so he shook it with cold water in a shaker.
Q 16Which southern Greek city gives its name to a famous dark purple, almond-shaped table olive?
Kalamata
Kalamata: the EU protects the name for olives grown around the city, though the variety itself, Kalamon, is grown across Greece.
Q 17Mastic, the aromatic resin used in sweets and liqueur, traditionally comes from which island?
Chios
Chios: growers score the bark so the resin weeps out in drops called 'tears', which are left to harden before they are gathered and cleaned.
Q 18Despite its name, Greek fava, the yellow puree served as a dip, is made from what?
Split peas
Split peas: yellow ones are simmered with onion until they collapse into a puree; the prized version, from one volcanic island, uses a local pea-like legume instead.
Q 19Assyrtiko, the crisp white wine grape trained into ground-hugging baskets against the wind, is native to which island?
Santorini
Santorini: its volcanic soil has kept out the vine pest phylloxera, so many vines there grow ungrafted on their own roots and are centuries old.
Q 20Fasolada, sometimes called the national food of the Greeks, is a soup of what?
White beans
White beans: dried ones are simmered with tomato, carrot and celery, and the soup is traditionally eaten with herring and crusty bread on the side.
Q 24On which day of the Orthodox calendar do Greeks traditionally eat taramasalata with onions and lemon?
Clean Monday
Clean Monday opens Great Lent, so the table is meatless, and it is a public holiday that Greeks spend outdoors, picnicking and flying kites.
Q 25Skordalia, the thick garlic puree, classically partners which dish on Greece's national day, which falls during Lent?
Batter-fried salt cod
Batter-fried salt cod: 25 March is also the Annunciation, a rare day in Lent when fish is allowed.
Q 26Who were the klephts, after whom kleftiko, lamb slow-roasted in a sealed parcel, is named?
Ottoman-era guerrillas and outlaws
Ottoman-era guerrillas and outlaws: the klephts are said to have cooked stolen lamb in sealed pits so that no smoke gave them away, and their name shares a root with kleptomania.
Q 27Saganaki, best known as fried cheese, is named after what?
A small two-handled frying pan
A small two-handled frying pan: anything cooked in it takes the name, shrimp and mussels included, and setting the cheese alight is a habit that began in Chicago's Greektown, not Greece.
Q 28Halloumi, the squeaky grilling cheese, originates from where?
Cyprus
Cyprus: the island's cheese melts so slowly that slices can be grilled or fried until golden without losing their shape.
Q 29Kokoretsi, the spit-roasted Paschal favourite, is held together by an outer wrapping of what?
Lamb or goat intestines
Lamb or goat intestines: they are wound around the skewered filling, and the spit turns alongside the Paschal lamb.
Q 30Loukaniko, the Greek sausage, is typically flavoured with fennel seed and what?
Orange peel
Orange peel: the recipe is distinctly Greek, but the name is not, coming from the Latin lucanica, a sausage the Romans named after Lucania in southern Italy.