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If you had to choose an essential ingredient that you almost always use in your recipes, which one would you choose? Chef José Andrés has it clear and that is paprika, a product so necessary in many Spanish dishes, on a par with “salt or oil”, as the Asturian chef emphasizes in his blog Longer Tables.
José Andrés chooses paprika as one of his favorite ingredients mainly for its smoky and sweet flavor, not as spicy as others, since in Spain we don’t usually tolerate spicy things very well. In many of the Spanish recipes that José Andrés himself shares on his website, paprika is always included. From the famous Fabada Asturiana bean stew, flavored with paprika, to the sweet and smoky romesco sauce, which can be served with anything and gives a surprising smoky flavor from the paprika. Not forgetting, of course, the Pulpo a la Gallega, and even his mother’s lentil stew recipe, which includes two whole spoonfuls of paprika.
Why is it such a sacred ingredient for Spaniards?
To explain the importance of paprika in traditional Spanish gastronomy, José Andrés goes back to the origins of peppers, first cultivated 9,000 years ago in Mexico. In fact, the word ‘chile’ is actually a word belonging to Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan macrolanguage.
This food arrived in Spain when Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas and bell pepper seeds were one of the products that the crew brought to our lands. These settled mainly in the region of Extremadura. Where the best peppers began to be cultivated was in a small town in Extremadura called La Vera. Over time, a technique was developed here to preserve the peppers by drying them with smoke, giving rise to what we know today as paprika, sweet and smoked, which since the nineteenth century, and became an essential ingredient, as recorded by Angel Muro, a famous food writer.
In addition to the famous DOP Pimentón de la Vera, there is also another surprising paprika in Spain, specifically in the southeastern part of Murcia, which is also DOP, but it is produced in a different way. It is not smoked and the flavor is sweeter.