Sweet or smoked paprika

What sweet and smoked paprika are

Paprika is the red powder made by drying and grinding the ripe fruit of Capsicum annuum, the same species that gives the bell pepper and the jalapeno. Two decisions separate one paprika from another, and they are independent. The first is how hot the powder is. A sweet paprika is made from varieties with little or no pungency, or from fruit with the hot parts removed, and tastes mild, never burning. A hot paprika is the opposite. Between them sits a bittersweet grade, with a mild heat. The second decision is how the peppers were dried. Smoked paprika comes from peppers dried over a wood fire, and carries that smoke into the powder; unsmoked paprika is dried in the sun or in warm air and tastes of the pepper alone. A powder can therefore be sweet and smoked, sweet and unsmoked, hot and smoked or hot and unsmoked.

The kind most often meant by the phrase "sweet or smoked paprika" in a recipe is the mild one, used for colour and flavour rather than for heat. Spanish pimentón and Hungarian paprika are the two great traditions. Pimentón de la Vera is the smoke-dried one, made in Extremadura and protected by a designation of origin. Pimentón de Murcia is an unsmoked, entirely sweet powder from southeast Spain. Szeged in Hungary is the centre of the Hungarian tradition, whose sweet and semi-sweet powders were made by removing the hot parts of the fruit. A powder labelled only "paprika" or "smoked paprika" may belong to any of these traditions, or to none of them.

The colour of paprika is one of its main uses. A deep red powder stains whatever it is cooked in, and the pigment is fat-soluble, so it carries into oil. Colour is graded by the ASTA scale, which measures the extractable red pigment; the La Vera specification, for example, sets a minimum of 90 ASTA units at milling.

From an American crop to a European spice

The pepper behind paprika was domesticated in Mexico. A 2014 study combining genetic, archaeological, ecological and linguistic evidence found support for central-east Mexico as the place where Capsicum annuum was first domesticated, with the genetic evidence alone favouring a more northerly area. The authors treat this as a model and discuss the limits of the archaeological record. It tells us about the crop, not about paprika powder, which came later.

Peppers reached Spain from the Americas as longer, hotter fruits. The regional authority of Murcia says that the traditional huerta growers made paprika from them from the time they arrived, and that local climate, soils, scarce water and cultivation methods rounded the fruit and moved its flavour towards sweet. The Bola pepper still defines Murcia's powder. In Extremadura, the powder of La Vera is made from the Ocales group of varieties, Jaranda, Jariza and Jeromin, and from the Bola.

In Hungary, the spice came by a different route: the Hungarikum Committee says that it was brought to the Carpathian Basin by the Turks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that it was grown from the early nineteenth century, at first as a flavouring herb for meat dishes, possibly first by the Franciscan monks of Szeged-Alsovaros. By the end of that century, ground and whole paprika was the leading commercial product of Szeged.

La Vera: smoke as part of the drying

Pimentón de la Vera exists because of rain. The valleys of La Vera have their rainfall in autumn, the season when the peppers are harvested, and that made sun drying, the method traditional in Murcia, unreliable. The farmers developed a drying shed instead: a brick building about five metres high, with a furnace of holm oak or oak on the lower floor and, above it, a wooden grating on which the peppers are spread. Hot air and smoke rise through the grating by convection. The peppers are turned regularly, and drying takes ten to fifteen days, bringing the fruit from about 80 percent moisture to under 15 percent. About five kilos of firewood are used for each kilo of dried pepper. The dried husks are kept in dry rooms until the local mills grind them, since any moisture they take up undoes the drying.

The specification defines three groups of La Vera paprika by flavour. Sweet paprika has a mild, completely sweet flavour and is made from the Bola and Jaranda varieties. Bittersweet paprika has a mild heat and is made from Jaranda and Jariza. Hot paprika, with a pronounced heat, is made from Jeromin, Jariza and Jaranda. All three are smoky, intense and penetrating in flavour and aroma, with a deep, bright red colour. The powder must pass a sieve with 1.19 millimetre mesh, contain no more than 14 percent moisture, and may occasionally have a little sunflower oil added for consistency.

The varieties differ in their colour power. The Ocales varieties measure 120 to 200 ASTA units, depending on the variety, and the Bola 90 to 140. The specification attributes this partly to anatomy: most of the red carotenoid pigment sits in the pericarp, the fruit wall, and the Ocales varieties have a small placenta and few seeds, whereas the Bola's large placenta and many seeds almost fill the fruit. The slow smoke drying also gives, in the producers' words, a very stable red colour that fades more slowly than that of other paprikas.

The trade grew quickly in the twentieth century. The specification cites a Spanish newspaper report of 1940 that the valleys of La Vera had produced eight million kilos of paprika in 1939, against 1,200,000 kilos in 1920, and records prizes won by a La Vera firm at exhibitions in Barcelona in 1916 and Seville in 1929. It stresses that the powder works both as a colouring and as a seasoning, which is why it appears in so many Spanish recipe books and is so closely tied to pork products: the same document says the antioxidant power of the paprika gives it a high preservative capacity in sausages and cured meats, a claim made in the producers’ own specification.

Murcia and Szeged: sweet without smoke

Pimentón de Murcia is made by milling fully red, ripe, healthy and dry peppers of the Bola variety. Its flavour must be entirely sweet, and is described as rich and savoury; its aroma is strong and penetrating and lasts well, and its colour is bright red and stable. It carries no smoke, which makes it the standard choice when a cook wants the pepper without the fire.

Hungarian paprika went through a change of character. Until the 1940s it was hot. Sweet and semi-sweet powders were made by removing the hot parts of the fruit, which was done by hand in the work called splitting: the core was cut out, the pod cut open and turned out, and the veins scraped away. Between the two World Wars more than 10,000 people worked at splitting in the Szeged area, at least 10,000 farmers grew paprika, and about twenty mills each employed at least fifteen to twenty people. No other Szeged industry employed as many. Splitting is why the Szeged powder came to be understood as the mild one.

Colour, heat and aroma

The red of paprika comes from carotenoid pigments made in the ripening fruit, chiefly capsanthin and capsorubin, which are found almost only in peppers. Yellow and orange fruits owe their colour to other carotenoids, such as the carotenes, zeaxanthin and lutein. The heat of a hot paprika comes from a different group of compounds, the capsaicinoids. Colour and heat are therefore separate qualities: a deeply coloured powder can be mild, and the colour tells you nothing reliable about pungency.

Aroma separates the smoked from the unsmoked. In a 2017 comparison of paprikas dried by smoke, in an oven and in the sun, a tasting panel associated the smoked samples with a persistent smoky character, the oven-dried with fruity notes of fresh pepper and the sun-dried with a straw-like aroma. Phenols and alcohols in the volatile profile went with the smoke descriptors and aldehydes with the fruity one. The result describes the tested samples, but it explains what a cook meets in the jar: smoked paprika brings the aroma of wood smoke, while sweet unsmoked paprika brings the fruit.

What paprika does in a fermented sausage

Paprika is the defining seasoning of Spanish chorizo. The Spanish Chorizo Consortium describes the red sausage as the product of paprika brought from the Americas, contrasts it with the earlier sausages made without it, and points to a dictionary definition of 1726; its common ingredients are pork, fat, paprika, garlic and salt. In the sausage, paprika carries colour, flavour, and effects on the fermentation itself.

Colour and the keeping of colour come first. A study of chorizo made with large amounts of paprika, and with different amounts of hot paprika, found that the sausages had greater colour intensity, that the colour stayed more stable, and that they had lower malonaldehyde, a measure of rancidity. The authors concluded that paprika, especially the hot variety, protects against rancidity. The same study found that more paprika accelerated ripening, probably by promoting the growth of lactic acid bacteria, which led to a faster fall in pH and water activity and to firmer texture sooner. Paprika does not replace the starter culture; the authors attribute the faster ripening to the seasoning favouring the acid-producing bacteria.

A starter-cultured chorizo recipe adds the powder before the culture. For a 1,000 gram batch of meat and fat it uses 17.5 g of sweet or smoked paprika and 7.5 g of spicy paprika, mixes the spices with the ground meat and fat, rests the mixture refrigerated overnight and adds the starter the next day. Smoked paprika gives the sausage a smoky aroma without the sausage being smoked, a separate operation; the choice between sweet, smoked and hot paprika changes the flavour and heat, not the process.

Choosing and storing paprika

Choose paprika by what the label can tell you: sweet, bittersweet or hot; smoked or not; and where it was made. A protected name such as Pimentón de la Vera or Pimentón de Murcia guarantees the variety, the drying and the grade. A powder without a name guarantees less, and its red colour does not show whether it is smoked, sweet or hot.

Ground paprika loses colour as it sits. A study of paprika powders stored with different combinations of time, fluorescent light and oxygen found that all three affected the breakdown of the carotenoid pigments, and that storage time had the strongest influence while oxygen had the least. A study of paprika held under controlled industrial conditions, without added antioxidants, followed carotenoids, fatty acids, peroxide index and microbial flora and found that the quality of the samples was maintained. Neither gives a household expiry date. The sensible course is to keep paprika sealed and away from light, and to replace it when its colour and aroma fade.

Allergy and dietary context

Paprika is made from Capsicum, and Capsicum can cause a true food allergy. A clinical report on a patient who reacted to bell and chilli pepper identified a pepper protein, Cap a 7, that cross-reacts with a protein of Japanese cedar pollen. The report shows that such reactions occur; it does not say how often. A person with a diagnosed Capsicum allergy needs individual advice, and sweet paprika, being a pepper, is still a Capsicum. Paprika has no gluten, but a blend may contain other ingredients, so the label of a purchased product matters.