spice question

[kevinv]

I keep seeing sweet papreka, smoked papreka, hot papreka, hungarian papreka, red papreka. I know what smoked papreka is now, and have found it at the store. But what is the others?

[mountaintony1]

how do you pick spices to make rubs, how do you know what to use

[BigVEg]

I keep seeing sweet papreka, smoked papreka, hot papreka, hungarian papreka, red papreka. I know what smoked papreka is now, and have found it at the store. But what is the others?

Paprika is actually the grinding of various dried red bell and hot peppers into a fine powder. For regular red paprika they use red bell peppers, for hot paprika they use red chilli's. And hungarian paprika is peppers from hungary, which has the best quality if peppers for making paprika.

As for what spices to use for making a rub, I would suggest starting with the most basic of idea's, what do you want to put on your food? Then built from that, do you want hotter, sweeter spicier flavours? And I don't think you need to reinvent the wheel, look up reciepes and adapt them to your own tastes, that's what I've done so far, and it's been fun and tasty!

[Peter]

Here is a good explanation of paprika. Long read, but thorough.

http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Caps_ann.html