Bravura | Chef Pipsa Hurmerinta was exhausted from a full-time job, and had to slow down – Now she conjures up a famine-time delicacy from crumbs, strawberries and black pepper

Outdoor is open, but there is no one in the hall.

“Hi, come here, we’re eating”, Pipsa Hurmerinta gasp from behind.

However, to be more precise, the meal has already ended. My daughter, who is just over a year old, vigorously refuses to eat any more of her broccoli-flavored lunch puree. Chef Hurmerinta has been on baby leave for a year. There is a potty under the kitchen table.

In a few weeks Penny however, starts kindergarten and his mother can go back to work.

“Thank God!” Hurmer chest heaves.

“Babies are the most wonderful thing in the world, but my passion is not to sit on the floor playing with cars forever. I feel that I have something more to give to the world.”

44-year-old Pipsa Hurmerinna has had many titles: top model, TV presenter, entrepreneur, food writer and chef. Some people think the combination is strange, because models don’t eat, do they?

Well, when Hurmerinta left for Paris at the age of 18, she found modeling jobs but also a local boyfriend. This one was interested in food in the traditional French way. So the young man took his pet to markets, supermarkets and restaurants. Hurmerinta really fell in love — that is, with food.

And when he moved back to Finland at the age of 27, that relationship became more serious.

“Where here is the damn joint search?” Pipsa Hurmerinta shouted in the lobby of Pasila’s office building in the spring and winter of 2006. She had returned to Finland, and it was time to think about what to do after her modeling career, and food came to mind.

No one takes seriously a model who announces that she will become a chef just like that, without training. So Hurmerinta wrote a joint search on Google and stated that the search period ends on the same day. He took a taxi to Pasila, finally found the joint application papers and filled them out in the toilet of the agency building. The following years were spent at Espoo’s Omnia vocational school and internships in various restaurants.

After cooking school, Hurmerinta founded a food company, hosted food shows on TV, developed recipes and did catering gigs. In 2019, he became the chef at the restaurant Sikke’s. It was the forty-year-old chef’s first full-time job.

“It was wonderful but also really exhausting,” Hurmerinta says now.

He was responsible for everything from cleaning floor drains to computer software and recruiting employees. After more than a year, Hurmerinta was completely finished.

“It was really good timing that I had the baby at this point. I have been able to recover a bit, and maybe now I can work in a more sustainable way. A small child sets limits.

There are still difficulties ahead. Customers are still wary of dining in restaurants due to the pandemic, and the prices of raw materials are rising.

“I’m afraid that the selection will be reduced if people only look at the price tag. Still, I understand it very well. I couldn’t afford to buy some burrata every day, even on medical leave.”

It is precisely because of the rise in prices that Hurmerinna’s food masterpiece, i.e. strawberry-black pepper crumble, is now relevant. Crumb-covered baking was born in Britain during the war, when there was a shortage of pie ingredients. So Crumble is a kind of substitute. However, no compromises are made when it comes to taste.

When the teenage Pipsa was captivated by the Parisian modeling world, her mother Kristina Hurmerinta decided to follow. He rented a house in Normandy and settled there for a few years. High school-aged Pipsa traveled there on weekends from Paris to hang out with her mother.

A cookbook was found in the stashes of the house with instructions for a crumble made from red berries. It was already excellent in its original form, but Hurmerinta has refined the recipe over the years.

“This is an ingenious instruction because many of the ingredients can be replaced by others,” he says while cleaning the strawberries.

Instead of strawberries, you can use blueberries, apricots or apples for example. Wheat flour can be replaced with oat or coconut flakes.

However, the two Hurmerintas will not change. The secret of Crumble is the classic duo: salt and pepper. Black pepper brings a sharp, delicious accent to the strawberry composition. A teaspoon of salt, on the other hand, emphasizes the richness of the crumb dough in the best possible way.

“Exactly the same thing as in restaurant food,” says Hurmerinta.

“It’s usually good because there’s so much butter and salt in it.”