Scarcity of natural materials especially aggregates is the biggest issue faced by the highway sector today globally. This is due to multiple overlapping factors predominately due to excessive consumption and a ban on aggregate quarrying activities. On the other hand, developing countries such as India generate enormous amounts of construction and demolition (C&D) waste, most of which directly goes to landfills. Extraction of value-added materials from C&D waste such as Recycled Concrete Aggregates (RCA) and utilizing them in place of natural stones and sands could address the aggregate scarcity issue to a great extent. However, the quality of RCA is inferior compared to natural gravel mainly due to the presence of the adhered hydrated cement mortar paste (HCMP). Although many techniques are available to lower the HCMP concentration, they are not large-scale applicable, energy-intensive, and are not sustainable. The present study aims to reduce the HCMP on the source itself by optimizing the crushing technique; the objective is to fundamentally understand the role of the crushing mechanism on the characteristics of different fractions of RCA and relate the same with the performance of paving concrete made with these RCA fractions. Widely adopted crushing techniques viz. Compression-based and impact-based crushing were considered in the present study. Similarly, numerous physical, chemical, and morphological properties of RCA were studied. The results depicted the superiority of impact-based crushing in producing relatively high-quality RCA which can be directly used for paving applications (100% substitution of natural aggregates) with minor altercations in the mix design.