Ingredients · Spice
Smoked Paprika
Capsicum annuum · Solanaceae (nightshade family)
What it’s like, and how to use it
How to use it
Stirred into warm fat off the heat — it scorches as easily as sweet paprika and burnt paprika cannot be rescued. In chorizo, paella, patatas bravas, beans and lentils. In a barbecue rub. On roasted potatoes and cauliflower. In anything vegetarian that wants to taste like it was cooked over a fire.
With food
Chorizo and pork. White beans and chickpeas. Potato. Eggs. Cauliflower and squash. Tomato. Olive oil. Almond.
With spices
Garlic and cumin. Oregano. Cayenne, where heat is wanted. Bay. Black pepper. Chipotle, for more smoke.
With tea
Lapsang Souchong or hojicha alongside a meal built on it — smoke meeting smoke.
Its story
Where it comes from
The smoked style belongs to La Vera in Cáceres, Extremadura, sheltered by the Sierra de Gredos, where the oak-fire drying is what makes it. Murcia's pimentón is a different thing — unsmoked, from bola or ñora peppers dried in the sun or in kilns. Our lot names no origin.
What happened
The smoking is a Spanish answer to a Spanish problem: Extremadura is wet enough in autumn that sun-drying is unreliable, so the peppers went over fires instead, and a technique born of weather became the flavour the world buys. The story goes that Columbus handed the first peppers to the monks of an Extremaduran monastery, who dried them over oak — sources disagree on which monastery, so it is best told as a story. What is documented is that La Vera's producers still do it the same way, turning the peppers by hand for a fortnight over slow oak fires.
On the shelf with it
Sold on its own, and in these blends.
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Paprika, Smoked
Regular price From $8.99 CADRegular price -
Hickory BBQ Seasoning
Regular price From $9.99 CADRegular price
