What Is Paprika?
There really is no easy answer to this question because there are lots of different types of paprika.
Paprika is made from red bell peppers. First, the bell peppers are allowed to dry and the stalks and inside veins are thrown away. The pepper flesh and the seeds are separated from each other and are separately ground into powders. This process is done for different types of bell pepper and the resultant powders are blended to produce the required taste.
Some peppers are dried over fires to give them a woody flavor.
And some pepper powders are mixed with powders from the fruits of other members of the capsicum family to give a paprika with some heat (bell peppers, by themselves, have no heat as recorded on the Scoville heat scale).
You can get hot, sweet or bittersweet flavours of paprika depending on the peppers used and even where the peppers were grown – the same plants produce different flavored peppers in different parts of the world.
Indian cuisine uses paprika mainly to add a red color to a dish whilst Hungarian cuisine uses paprika a lot to give their dishes flavor, as well as color.
