When Will My Food Be Ready? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Five days

While five days may be cutting it to a minimum, sourdough starter, consisting of souring wild yeast, needs to wait a while before it can be used, while regular bread can be made with any active yeast without waiting. Many who create traditional sourdough bread will create the starter over at least a couple of weeks, refreshing the contents with flour and water to increase microbes that add to the flavour of the dough. Ultimately, through the process of refreshment, the starter will get to a point where it will rise adequately during baking and form a solid loaf. Does the starter go bad? Well...not really, provided you maintain it. Since old, unused starters can be combined with new batches, you could theoretically be using the same dough over and over.

...and that's before your meal starter arrives. ;)

Answer: Thirty years

Yup-- it's a long one. Red wines tend to age for quite a bit if they're of a vintage, but some, especially cheap or homemade wines, can be opened fairly quickly after their bottling. But the French know how to do it right. The Bordeaux takes up to thirty years to age whereas something like a Merlot could take about five (give or take a year). Nonetheless, French reds are often considered significantly better with age, more so than white which, while it can sit for a while, tends to be fine in under a few years.

Answer: Several months

Cheddar cheese takes a pretty long time to get from just milk to whatever you plan on eating. You start with milk, add rennet, then set, cut, cook, and drain the curd before altering the curd in a process called cheddaring. When that's all out of the way, you have to let it sit.

A typical mild cheddar will wait a couple of months, but all good things come with age; a mature cheddar can take up to several years depending on how long it's set to age. Each cheese, of course, has a different aging time depending on what it is and how it reacts to different additions and chemicals.

Answer: Three

Pears take a pretty long time to grow. In fact, while you're likely to get some small pears off a new tree after a few years, the tree won't yield a full crop for, in some cases, more than double that time, so if you're starting from scratch, you're going to be waiting a long time for that piece of fruit. Citrus trees take about half the time to yield fruit while sweet cherries take longer; you could end up waiting up to seven years for a good haul of cherries. You'd be quicker to get a banana than a pear.

Answer: Two seasons

Although not as popular a dish outside Korea, kimchi is a popular one in its home country. Made from vegetables (usually cabbage) pickled in brine with chili powder, and left to ferment until it reaches the proper taste, kimchi can be made nowadays by combining the right ingredients in a jar and letting it chill out. Way back when, and in some parts of South Korea even now, the stuff is made en masse and placed into jars to be buried during the late autumn and winter. Because of seasonal variations, there are many different types of kimchi to suit.

Answer: No

Many people really go for meat on the bone simply because they believe it gives better flavour to the meat being used in a dish, but with pulled pork you're likely to aim for something more tender and you're apt to cover it in some sort of flavouring. The simple truth is that the bone inside the meat takes longer to heat up and longer to cool down because it's bone. In the slow cooker, this means that the internal meat is not cooking all the way through quite as easily. Thus, it's going to take more time.

That being said, if you're using a SLOW cooker, you knew you weren't aiming for speed anyways.

Answer: That the meat inside is the right temperature

Really, this one, like most meat dishes, comes down to whether or not the meat has cooked through. With a wellington you're expecting to roast and bake the dish, applying eggwash to the pastry crust, and ensuring that your wrapped meat does reach that temperature necessary to indicate that it's medium or medium-rare or whatever you're aiming for.

As much as you should be pulling a golden pastry out of the oven, you should also use a meat thermometer to make sure you're not eating something raw within a cooked crust.

At the right temperature, baking this dish should only take about twenty to thirty minutes in an oven, but prep for the meal is a bit more intensive.

Answer: Several hours

Baumkuchen is a German cake that's popular in both Europe and Japan. Time-consuming to make, baumkuchen is baked on a rotating spit on which a chef must brush pastry as it turns. When each successive layer is browned, another layer is added, on and on until the cake reaches the amount of layers you want. Since each thin layer needs to cook, one at a time, before the next can be added, the tedium only goes on until the chef decides it's ready. That said, when cut into, the cake will have a unique layer effect, so much so that in Japan it's known as a 'tree cake' since it resembles a tree's internal growth rings.

Answer: A few minutes

While running a coffee pot or using your French press could take a good deal of time and effort, a single-cup brewer like a Tassimo or a Keurig is probably much quicker, especially if you're the only one having a cup. Machines like those tend to preheat the water inside them at the push of a button, and then use the contents of an inserted coffee pod to make the beverage you're waiting for. Since the water's already heated, it only takes anywhere from half a minute to a minute to be dripped into the cup. Easy peasy.

Answer: Two months

This comes down to whether or not you expect you're going to be drinking silver tequila or gold tequila as the silver takes about two months to distill the former (it's a year for the latter). Tequila is made by harvesting agave and baking it before shredding it, grinding it down, and extracting its juices. It's fermented for a few days before transferring to oak barrels. While your shot could have taken anywhere between two and twelve months to head to the bottle, you could also pay top dollar for ultra aged tequila. That stuff sits in the barrels for a few years.

...about the same length of time as the hangover.