8 Best Substitutes For Smoked Paprika

You're planning a Spanish tapas party and have promised your guests patatas bravas and smoked paprika chicken. You head to the grocery store to get the ingredients. It's all in your cart except the smoked paprika, which is nowhere to be found. No time for online shopping — you'll have to find a substitute.

Smoked paprika has a unique smokey, peppery flavor with just a hint of spice. Spanish farmers hand-pick perfectly ripe red peppers and then smoke them dry over an oak fire for 10 to 15 days, according to La Chinata, which holds the protected designation of origin, de La Vera. Smoked paprika occupies a lauded place in Spanish cooking, according to the journal Foods. A survey of Spanish households showed that the population in the Extremadura region consumes 139 grams of smoked paprika per person per year. That means going through two cans like this one from Amazon.

It's not easy to find a substitute for such a unique, beloved spice. Consider this Amazon reviewer who tried to recreate her favorite patatas bravas at home: "The recipe named this particular pimentón but I figured the paprika I had my spice rack would suffice, wrong! I hunted it down on Amazon and couldn't be happier." That being said, read on to learn about some possible substitutes for smoked paprika. They're not going to perfectly duplicate this spice's unique flavor, but they might do the trick in a pinch.

Coming up with the best substitute for smoked paprika requires intimate knowledge of how farmers produce this spice. That starts with seeds for Capsicum annuum, according to The Journal of Business Chemistry. Peppers come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors from sweet to hot. People use several varieties to make paprika and they usually belong to the Longum variety. The quality, both in taste and maturity, of the pepper gives paprika its flavor or lack thereof. The better the raw material the tastier the paprika.

With that in mind, cooks can replace ground-up dried peppers (paprika) with fresh peppers, but they'll need to process them first. To add the elusive taste of smoked paprika, charring the veggies on a grill should do the trick. BBC GoodFood recommends using Romano peppers. To prepare them, keep them whole, turn them often, and wait until the skin is blackened. It takes 15 to 20 minutes. Then, let the peppesr cool and the charred skin should peel right off. What's left is the delicious, soft, red flesh infused with a smokey flavor. This can be run through a food processor to make a paste to add to sauces and a variety of recipes. It comes close to the taste, if not the texture, of smoked paprika.

The store may not stock smoked paprika, but look through the spice section a second time for smoked pepper flakes. According to La Chinata, these pepper flakes have the same production process as the powder, just without fine stone milling. The ripe peppers are oak-smoked for a couple of weeks before heading to the processing plant.

El Rey De La Vera, a brand of smoked paprika, says the larger size of pepper flakes means they won't dissolve and integrate themselves in a dish the same way as the powder. On the other hand, eating a dish with crushed pepper means your tongue will be surprised by hits of paprika flavor intermittently. That makes it a less homogenous, more explosive experience.

If homogenous taste and flavor are what you're after, though, you could use a mortar and pestle to grind flakes into something closer to paprika before adding it to a recipe.

Spending two weeks over an oak fire in a smokehouse infuses a lot of flavor into the peppers used to make smoked paprika. There are other ways to bottle up smokey flavor, though. For example, in the 1800s, Earnest Wright noticed how the smoke from his fire condensed on the stove pipe, according to The American Meat Association. That observation led him to use wood fires to create a liquid ingredient that could add a smokey flavor to foods.

Wright's liquid smoke is still around today and you can find it on the shelves of many major supermarket chains, according to the company's website. It's simple to use and just a few drops add a lot of flavor, so use it sparingly, say the company's tips. Cooks can brush it directly on meat or mix it into sauces, soups, and even cocktails. If you're making the bravas sauce for patatas bravas, a few drops of liquid smoke will give it another dimension of taste if you can't get ahold of smoked paprika.

The substitution works the other way around too. John Willoughby, food writer for the NYT, uses smoked paprika instead of liquid smoke when he makes oven barbeque. Either way, both the original spice and the bottled flavoring add a deliciously smokey flavor to any recipe in which they appear.

Chorizo most often makes an appearance on charcuterie platters, but it's a spectacular ingredient to add to bean soup, stuffed peppers, and rice with chicken. Wherever it shows up, it brings along the smokey essence of pimentón de La Vera. If your stew or rice dish lists smoked paprika as an ingredient and you can't find any, adding a little chorizo could do the trick.

Chorizo is a traditional, cured sausage from the Iberian Peninsula. To make this delicacy, people mix pork and spices, pack the blend into casings and then cure the product, according to CyTA – Journal of Food. One of the most abundant spices in this sausage is smoked paprika. The presence of the red powder gives the cured meat its distinctive aroma and bright color. Smoked paprika's antioxidant qualities also mean that the taste and ruddy hue of the meat last longer.

The Spanish like their chorizo a lot. A survey of smoked paprika consumption by the University of Extremadura has shown that nearly half of the paprika eaten by the Spanish comes from this cured product. Specifically, 65.7 grams out of 139 grams per year per person came from chorizo.

Pimentón de La Vera comes from Spain, but the peppers originated in Central America. Do the Spanish deserve all the credit for smoked paprika? According to The Austin Chronicle, the Aztecs had been drying peppers by smoking them long before the farmers of La Vera developed the process. 

Mexicans call smokey, dehydrated jalapeño peppers "chipotles." In the US, people may associate the word more often with the chain restaurant, overlooking that the name comes from Nahuatl — the native tongue of the Aztecs. South of the border, farmers make chipotle by placing peppers in smokehouses since they might otherwise spoil before drying naturally. In Mexico and the US, chipotle peppers are available in supermarkets as whole dried peppers, a powdered spice, and canned in adobo sauce.

Chipotles are smokey and spicy. They're a brownish, dusty color. Smoked paprika is sweeter and bright red. The two are not interchangeable in every recipe, but why not give patatas bravas with ground chipotle a try?

You want to add some smokey flavor to a recipe, but you find that your tin of pimentón de La Vera is empty. Liquid smoke has a chemical aroma to it that you can't stand, so that's out of the question. This is when you grab a few heads of garlic, roast them on your grill and mix them in, per Chef Greg Mueller, director of culinary innovation at REC TEC Grills. He chops about a 1/4 inch off the top of his heads of garlic, sets them in a ceramic dish with bountiful olive oil, and lets them cook slowly (about 90 minutes) over a wood pellet fire. When he pulls them out, he doesn't even have to peel off the skin — the gooey, smokey garlic squirts out when he squeezes the bulbs.

Weston, a company that makes smokers, has a different approach to smoked garlic. They suggest making smoked garlic powder if you have an abundant crop of bulbs in your garden. It takes just two hours in a smoker to infuse garlic with flavor. Run it through a grinder to make an easy-to-sprinkle-on powder. The homemade spice adds a smokey flavor to any recipe.

Look no further than the grocery store if you need a quicker solution. Amazon offers jars of smoked garlic paste for $21.99, but your wallet will thank you if you just head to Walmart instead for a $4.96 jar of woodfired garlic.

Before reaching for just any spice as a substitute for smoked paprika, consider what role it plays in your recipe. Pimentón de La Vera adds a smokey flavor, a bright red color, and just a bit of heat. Does your recipe require all three? If you're most focused on waking up your taste buds, then you could consider adding other powdered pepper products.

Paprika comes from dried, sweet red peppers, according to the Journal of Business Chemistry. These peppers generally belong to the Longum group which is a family producing long, narrow fruit. The University of North Carolina says cayenne and other types of chili peppers also belong to this classification. They differ from the varieties grown for paprika because they are much spicier, but people also dry them to make powdered spices.

Adding a mild chili powder to a recipe will add flavor and some color, but you'll still need something to replace the smoked flavor if that's important. If you're not sure the substitution will work, separate out a bit of your food, add a sprinkling of chili powder, and taste test it before pouring spicy powder into the whole pot.

Sweet paprika and smoked paprika — could they really be so different? Researchers from the University of Extremadura asked exactly that. They compared paprika made from smoked, oven-dried, and sun-dried peppers. They wanted to know how the spices impacted the sensory experience of eating chorizo, or Spanish sausage. Smoked paprika had the best flavor and the stablest color even after 60 days of storage. The scientists may not have been completely unbiased though — Extremadura is home to La Vera, the region most famous for making smoked paprika.

On the other hand, Hungary is famous for the sweet kind of paprika, according to The Journal of Business Chemistry. It is so brilliantly red that companies make natural food dyes from the spice. So, if you're adding smoked paprika to add a red tint — for example, to homemade pasta — then sweet paprika will likely do the trick, according to The New York Times.