To recreate the spice of hot paprika, the best substitute is another dried chilli, like ground cayenne, aleppo pepper powder, crushed red pepper flakes, red chilli powder, or even a dash of hot sauce. If your recipe calls for smokiness and sweetness, try chipotle chilli powder or ancho pepper powder. Chipotle powder has a smoky taste, but is hotter than paprika with a more earthy flavour, lending itself to barbecue sauces, rubs and chillis. Due to the difference in heat, use a ¼ teaspoon of chipotle powder for every teaspoon of paprika and adjust depending on your taste buds.

If you’re looking to replicate the flavour of sweet paprika add a pinch of sugar or some honey. Adding mild chilli powder or tomato powder works too. Bell peppers are another great substitute for sweet paprika and they come from the same Capsicum annuum family. Mild, sweet and aromatic, bell peppers give the same delicious taste and aroma, while adding a splash of colour too. When buying your bell peppers, make sure they’re nice and ripe.

One of the best substitutes for paprika is cayenne pepper. It’s a spicy chilli pepper, used to flavour many different cuisines and quite similar in colour. It’s a lot stronger and hotter than paprika, so if you’re using it as a substitute in your cooking, make sure you use a lesser quantity. If you have a lower tolerance to spicy food, you can add salt, cream, chopped tomatoes or more liquid (water or broth) to try and dial down the heat.

Like paprika, chilli powder packs a lot of flavour and is another worthy substitute. It’s also not as spicy as cayenne pepper, so you can use the same quantities.  The same goes for cajun spices. A combination of black and white pepper, plus other herbs and spices, it can work as a good substitute for smoked or sweet paprika, offering a similar flavour. But you won’t get the same beautiful red colour – more of an orange, warm hue.

You can also use cumin instead of paprika. But it’s a lot hotter, so go easy on the quantities. Like cajun spices, you won’t achieve the gorgeous red colour of paprika, as cumin has more of a yellowy-brown colouring, but you’ll still get an earthy flavour with hints of bitterness and sweetness.

Another worthy replacement for smoked paprika is ancho chili powder. It’s made from dried and ground ancho chiles. This pepper is more common in Mexican cooking but found its way into the United States by way of Tex Mex cuisine. They offer mild to medium heat that only ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 SHU. It has a deep, smoky and slightly sweet flavor. For this reason, you don’t have to worry as much when using this as a replacement as it won’t overpower your dish as easily compared to chipotle powder. To use as an effective backup, you can incorporate exactly how much a recipe calls for smoked paprika.

The spiciness of a chili pepper can vary widely depending on the specific variety of pepper. The heat level of chili peppers is measured on the Scoville scale, which quantifies the amount of capsaicin, the compound responsible for the peppers' heat. Different types of chili peppers have different levels of capsaicin, resulting in a wide range of spiciness.

Crushed red pepper flakes are basically just dried peppers that are not ground to powdered form. Because it has not been ground further, it will leave you a mix of seeds and pepper flakes. This condiment is often used to garnish pizza, soups, and stews to add a layer of spicy flavor. That said, it might not be a good backup for some recipes because of its coarse texture. The good thing is you can always use your handy spice grinder to ground it into powdered form.

It should be noted that spicy food and spicy hot food are two different flavors. If you love spicy hot food that makes your taste buds tingle and take notice, you are probably a fan of hot sauces. 

Cayenne comes from the cayenne pepper. These peppers are also part of the Capsicum annuum family, but they’re much hotter than the peppers used to make paprika (from 35,000 Scoville heat units and up).