Our Basque pintxos recipes make Basque snacks called ‘pintxos’ in Basque or ‘pinchos’ in Spanish. Pronounced ‘peen-chos’ and offered in bars in Spain’s Basque Country, most famously in the city of San Sebastian, pintxos are often likened to Spanish tapas but are more like Italian crostini. Easy to make, these Basque snacks are perfect for easy entertaining, casual gatherings or just a relaxed evening at home.
Our Basque pintxos recipes will make you classic Basque snacks of tasty toppings on toasted baguette slices, typically served buffet-style on bar counter-tops. Effortless to prepare, as affordable or as expensive as you like, and easy to eat, pintxos are perfect for laidback entertaining and relaxed gatherings. Along with Spanish tapas, they make casual fuss-free meals.
We’ve been making Basque pintxos at home since our first trip to Spain in the summer of 1999, when we grazed our way through the pintxo bars in the old town of San Sebastian, capital of Euskadi or Basque Country, an autonomous region in northern Spain. Our inspiration had been the legendary Keith Floyd’s Basque Country episode of his cooking series Floyd On Spain, which we’d first watched years earlier in Australia, before moving abroad.
In that 1992 series, Floyd famously cooked a hearty Basque inspired dish for the men at a txoko, a private men’s cooking club cum gastronomic society, founded more than a century ago in San Sebastian, before he did a pintxo bar hop along calle 31 de Agosto, then the main “tapas bar street”, as Floyd mistakenly referred to the boisterous pintxos bar lane.
Basque pintxos are typically described as Basque-style tapas, much to the displeasure of Basque people, who are fiercely proud of their heritage and quick to explain the history of their region and unique language, traditions and culinary culture that set it apart from Spain – a country from which they sought independence, and were in armed conflict with for over 50 years.
Traditional Basque pintxos are more like Italian crostini than Spanish tapas – although much more inventive. The modern pintxos we munched on that first summer in San Sebastian, and trips to follow, could be incredibly imaginative. While we’re sharing recipes for the classic Basque pintxo, which is essentially a savoury topping on toast, there are so many more styles of pintxos.
But before I tell you more about our Basque snacks recipes for pintxos, we have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo, by using our links to buy products on Amazon, such as these classic cookbooks for serious cooks or cookbooks for culinary travellers, or shop our Grantourismo store on Society6 for gifts for foodies designed with Terence’s images. Now let’s tell you about our Basque pintxos recipes.
Basque Pintxos Recipes for Basque Style Tapas for Easy Entertaining
This Basque pintxos recipes will make you the incredibly delicious drinking snacks called ‘pintxos’ in Basque or ‘pinchos’ in Spanish – pronounced ‘peen-chos’ or ‘pin-chos’ depending on who you ask. They are some of the quickest and easiest appetisers to prepare, and some of the most satisfying to savour. They’re also incredibly versatile.
Deliciously addictive, Basque pintxos are usually presented buffet-style on bar counter-tops. In the early days of pintxo bars, platters of pintxos were offered as complimentary bites to sate the appetite, soak up the booze, and, with a salty element, coax you into drinking more. They were typically in this classic pintxo style of toppings on toast.
Hot pintxos, fancier pintxos and pintxos made with better quality ingredients had to be paid for and were listed on menu boards with prices, and could be ordered from the bartenders. After foreign tourism exploded in Spain, bars began charging for all pintxos, as they did for tapas elsewhere in the country, which were also often complimentary.
The reason? Greedy tourists, especially frugal backpackers, would sit on one drink while gobbling down more than their fair share of snacks, treating the pintxo bar hop as their main meal, rather than appetisers before dinner as the locals did. Most pintxos were pierced with toothpicks and staff calculated the bill by counting your toothpicks.
On that very first Floyd on Spain-inspired trip to San Sebastian, Floyd said the pintxos he sampled cost as little as a few pesetas. They cost a little more when we arrived seven years later, but they were as cheap as a euro or two in today’s currency, or up to five euros for the fancier or hot pintxos made with premium produce.
We went to San Sebastian that first time armed with a list of the bars that Floyd had eaten at and the pintxos to try: enormous marinated white anchovies, tender octopus in paprika-spiked olive oil, spicy sausages and peppers, creamy smoked trout, all piled onto fresh or toasted baguette slices, and washed down with glasses of txacoli, the aerated white wine.
After becoming obsessed with Basque pintxos that summer, we began recreating the drinking snacks we most loved the second we got back home – and also began concocting our own pintxo toppings.
Our recipe will make you a handful of the classic Basque drinking snacks of a well thought-out combination of tasty toppings on toasted baguette slices. One of those is a classic combination that we became obsessed with after trying it at one of the most popular bars in San Sebastian, and that’s anchovy on cream cheese.
Another traditional combination, which you’ll see in the image above, were slices of potato tortilla on a toasted baguette slice. It was a little different to how tortillas are traditionally served in Spain, which is a slice of tortilla on a plate with bread on the side. We haven’t included it in the recipe below, as it’s so easy to prepare: make the potato tortilla first, cut it into pieces, and slide the pieces onto the toasted baguette slices.
Terence created the other combinations, partly inspired by our travels through Europe that summer – through Italy, Spain and Portugal – and partly inspired by ‘home’, as we were living in the Middle East at the time, in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The thing about Basque pintxos is that they are typically creative and modern, in contrast to Spanish tapas, which are mostly traditional, imaginative tapas being the exception rather than the rule. You could go to a dozen tapas bars in Madrid or Seville and every tapas menu will be similar – as would be the presentation of the tapas themselves.
By contrast, in San Sebastian – which was one of the hottest destinations in Spain, the bars in the old town heaving with Spanish tourists throughout the summer – every bar offered a different array of pintxos, each more creative than the next, in an attempt to lure drinkers away from other bars.
That meant that when it came to pintxos toppings, there were no rules. Cooks could get as imaginative as they liked, and that’s exactly what they did. Each night we’d go out not only hoping to find our favourite snacks at our favourite bars from the previous night, but looking forward to discovering what exciting new flavour combinations were on the counter that night.
Our Basque pintxos recipes include some of those delicious combos from San Sebastian that we loved.
Tips to Making these Basque Pintxos Recipes
I only have a few tips to preparing these easy Basque pintxos recipes, as they’re really not that difficult at all. Our advice is to treat these as a starting point. We’ve been making pintxos for 24 years, and while we have our favourites, we still like to create new combinations of toppings, and we encourage you to do the same.
Our Basque pintxos recipes will make you four different kinds of Basque snacks, plus, as I said above, you’ll spot pieces of potato tortilla on toasted baguette slices in the image above, and while we’ve excluded that from the pintxos recipe, we’ve shared links to tortilla recipes below.
If you’re planning on making our easy Basque pintxos recipes for a gathering – I’m told ‘entertaining’ is out of fashion, and everyone is just casually gathering these days! – then you could easily start prepping a day or two before.
You could make a potato tortilla a couple of days before (we have recipes for potato tortilla with onion and potato tortilla with chorizo), and prepare the savoury mince with baharat seven spice blend the day before. We have a homemade hummus recipe and olive tapenade recipe, which could also be prepped a day or two in advance.
Or, you could buy store-bought hummus, tapenade, and basil pesto. We don’t buy hummus and tapenade, as we prefer to make them from scratch, although we do buy basil pesto as we can’t find fresh Italian basil seeds here in Cambodia to make pesto from scratch.
Let me know if you need any more tips to making our easy Basque pintxos recipes and I’ll add them here, but this is a super straightforward recipe. If you come up with your own creative combinations for toppings, please do let us know in the comments below or share them with us on Instagram. We’d love to try them ourselves! Enjoy!
Basque Pintxos Recipes for Basque Style Tapas
Ingredients
- 2 French baguettes
- 1 cup extra virgin olive oil - divided
Red Capsicum, Tapenade, Basil
- 1 red capsicum - trimmed, deseeded, halved
- 100 g olive tapenade
- ½ cup fresh basil leaves
Hummus, Savoury Mince, Mint
- 100 g ground beef
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp baharat spice mix
- 100 g hummus
- 12 sprigs fresh mint
Pesto, Rucola, Parmesan, Pine Nuts
- 100 g basil pesto
- 2 cups rucola - arugula/rocket
- 50 g Parmigiano Reggiano
- 50 g pine nuts
Cream Cheese, Anchovies and Chives
- 100 g Philadelphia cream cheese
- 4 anchovies
- 4 garlic chives - finely sliced
Instructions
- Heat your oven to 220°C, line a baking tray with aluminium foil, lay out the red capsicum halves, pour the cup of extra virgin olive oil into a bowl, and use a silicon pastry brush to coat the capsicum halves in oil.
- Slide the tray into the oven, roast the red capsicum until charred, remove the tray, and set them aside to cool. When cool, remove the blackened skins by rubbing it with a paper kitchen towel, then slice into thin strips.
- While the capsicums are roasting, in a small pan heat a tablespoon of olive oil and fry the ground beef and teaspoon of baharat spice mix, using a fork to separate the minced meat and ensure the spices are incorporated. When cooked, set aside.
- Prepare your baguettes: slice them on an angle for a larger surface area, cutting them to a thickness of 2cm. For crunchy texture (good for stale bread), lay the slices out on an oven tray, slide it into the oven, brown one side, turn them over, brown the other side; brush them with extra virgin olive oil, then set them aside. Otherwise (best for fresh bread), toast the slices in a toaster, brush them with extra virgin olive oil, and lay them out on a platter or small plates and set aside.
- For the capsicum, tapenade and basil pintxos, generously spread the olive tapenade onto four toasted baguette slices, lay down the roasted red capsicum slices and garnish with fresh basil leaves.
- For the hummus, mince and mint pintxos, spread the hummus onto four toasted baguette slices, spoon on generous scoops of spiced beef, and garnish with fresh mint sprigs
- For the pesto, rucola, parmesan, and pine nut pintxos, spread the four toasted baguette slices with basil pesto, pile on some rucola (arugula/rocket) leaves, grate some Parmigiano Reggiano on top, and sprinkle on some pine nuts.
- For the cream cheese, anchovies and chives pintxos, spread Philadelphia cream cheese generously onto four toasted baguette slices, lay an anchovy or two on top and sprinkle with finely sliced garlic chives.
Nutrition
Click through for more ideas for what to cook this week. Please do let us know in the comments below if you make our Basque pintxos recipes as we’d love to know how they turn out for you.
I love all of these Basque pintxos, but the cream cheese and anchovies one was such a revelation the first time I made it! These now are a staple for cocktail gatherings at our place.
Thanks for the recipes
Hi Jill, so pleased to read this! The cream cheese and anchovies pintxo was a revelation to us, too, when we first tasted it in San Sebastian all those years ago. We could not believe that something so simple could taste so good – which is why it was the first pintxo we made when we got back home after that trip. Thanks for taking time to drop by and leave a comment :)