It has a dusky, smoky taste because the peppers are roasted over oak fires, then ground. It comes in sweet, bittersweet and hot (dulce, agridulce and picante.)
Use sparingly because it has a strong taste.
The peppers are grown in the La Vera valley in the Extremadura region of Spain. The hot variety is actually made from Cascabel chiles, the sweet variety is made from long, red peppers whose exact variety isn’t freely divulged. It’s also not divulged freely whether the bittersweet is a mixture of the two, or yet another pepper.
The peppers are started off as seedlings in greenhouses in March, and put out to fields in May. They are picked in October when peppers are bright red, but before they start to dry out.
They are gathered in burlap sacks and then loaded on flatbed trucks that haul them to the drying buildings. There, they are dried over smoke from oak logs for 10 to 15 days, and hand-turned during that time every day. Then, they are ground into powder by machines, and packed.
Most Pimentón de la Vera is actually sold bulk to chorizo sausage factories. The rest is packed in small tins for sales direct to consumers.
The finished product has a Spanish Denominacíon de Origen.
There are several different brands.
Substitutes
Paprika with some ground chipotle chile.
Equivalents
4 tablespoons = 1 oz / 30g
History Notes
In the mid 1800s, farmers in the valley of La Vera in Extremadura began growing peppers for profit and making pimentón. There were possibly first introduced into the area via the Monastery of Guadalupe or the Yuste Monastery in Caceres there.