Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

There is no simple answer to this question.

There are lots of types of paprika.

Traditionally, paprika is made from red bell peppers. The peppers are allowed to dry and then the stalks and the inside veins are discarded. The pepper fruit and seeds are separated from each other and separately ground into powder. 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 flavour.

And some pepper powders are mixed with powders from the fruits of other members of the capsicum family to give a paprika with heat (bell peppers, by themselves, have no heat as recorded on the Scoville heat scale).

So 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 flavour peppers in different parts of the world.

Indian cuisine uses paprika mainly to add a red colour to a dish while the Hungarian cuisine uses paprika a lot to give their dishes flavour, as well as colour.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.