just ground-up red pepper really change anything? Not really. It still works wonders in everything from Hungarian goulash to BBQ rubs to those aggressively orange Spanish potatoes. It adds that warm, earthy, slightly sweet thing. Sometimes smoky. Sometimes not. Depends on the kind.
But maybe it’s just that the illusion got shattered. Like, we all grew up thinking of spices as exotic and mysterious, shipped in from faraway lands and crushed under the wheels of ancient spice caravans or something. And then we find out paprika is basically a dried
