PAPRIKA HUNGARIAN

Description

Profile: This sweet smoked paprika powder is powerful and statuesque, like prominent Hungarian ballerina Nora Kovach. It is both sweet and powerful, leaving audiences in amazement and having a massive influence around the world.

Details:

This Hungarian sweet smoked paprika powder has a powerful sweet bell pepper flavor that is earthy and vegetal. That means it works best with milder flavors such as soups, salads, vegetables, and grains.

Paprika has a more convoluted history and classification than any other spice. Paprika is manufactured from the Capsicum annuum plant. This pepper comes in dozens of chilli and bell types. They're all the same species genetically. (Consider how all humans are human, but look completely different.)

Paprika was used by the indigenous peoples of North and Central America as a food and a dye. The plant was brought back to Spain by Spanish explorers together with tomatoes, potatoes, and other crops. The Spanish – notably the poorer classes, as the rich despised the heat of paprika – began utilizing the seeds in cooking.

The seeds travelled from Iberia to Turkey, via the Ottoman Empire, and into Europe, Balkans, and Russia. It later endeared it to India and the Middle East. The Spanish smoked it, the Turks preferred stronger variants, while the Hungarians preferred sweet and mild. But paprika is mostly grown in Hungary and Spain, with the US coming in third.

So we have countless paprika variants.