Ernst Knam: Would you pay 120 euros for an Easter egg?
Ernst Knam: Would you pay 120 euros for an Easter egg?

Video: Ernst Knam: Would you pay 120 euros for an Easter egg?

Video: Ernst Knam: Would you pay 120 euros for an Easter egg?
Video: PROVIAMO LE UOVA DI PASQUA PIÙ COSTOSE: MASSARI vs KNAM - ABBIAMO SPESO 98 € PER UN UOVO! (FOLLIA) 2024, March
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We use "radical chic" for all the wrong things and never for the fact that Ernst Knam, 53, a pupil of Gualtiero Marchesi, sells a Easter egg to 120 euros (but custom-made asks for up to 300).

Or that in the icy pastry without bar of the center of Milan, in via Anfossi 10, opened in 1992 and renovated at the end of 2015 "with a profound restyling designed in form and substance by the architect Lorenzo Palmeri", as stated by the press office, neither the client nor the aforementioned architect have provided a rag of a table.

So, just in case you had the idea, which must have seemed extravagant to the two, to have one of the cakes prepared for Easter 2016 from " king of chocolate"(Nickname with which the judge of Bake Off Italy) be they the pastiera (35 euros per kg.), the pasqualina cake (35 euros per kg.), or the blackberry cake ("grandmother's cake" revisited: sponge cake with almond flour, lemon jelly, mousse with Tahitian vanilla and blackberries, 39 euros per kg.).

An idea that, evidently, does not touch the Milanese: they enter, observe, ask, pay, leave.

Happy for this more expensive but also more expendable form (beautiful, almost sculptural, capable of impressing) of the sweets that we mere mortals have always bought in first generation pastry shops.

pastiera, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
pastiera, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
ernst knam pastry shop, milan
Ernst Knam
Ernst Knam

There is another thing I want to tell you.

I belong to the school of thought that cannot convince itself of the need to combine chocolate with fermented black garlic, pink pepper, anchovy sauce, Taggiasca olives, yuzu, gorgonzola, if not to please your image as a pastry chef innovative and out of the ordinary.

So I remained insensitive to the appeal of the much praised line of Oltre pralines (85 euros per kg.), Without wanting to deny the best known pastry chef in Milan a particularly creative approach.

I would be false if you did, as well as blinded.

chocolate pralines, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
chocolate pralines, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
chocolate pralines, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
chocolate pralines, ernst knam pastry shop, milan

So is it not true, you will say, that those who buy from Ernst Knam do so because they are unrealistic foolish by fashions?

I'm not saying this, but the disappearance from the windows of the small flat and circular cakes, colored green, red, blue, orange, baptized with boastful complacency Knam Extreme and stuffed with surprising ingredients that mix sweet and salty, in short, the collection that was supposed to represent the real novelty in the production of the brilliant Teutonic pastry chef impressed me.

Coincidence or did the complacent Milanese customers also find the combinations all too unusual?

ernst knam pastry shop windows, milan
ernst knam pastry shop windows, milan
ernst knam pastry shop windows, milan
ernst knam pastry shop windows, milan

They could always make up for it by buying the classic colomba, with candied Sicilian almonds and oranges (35 euros per kg.).

A separate discussion deserve the chocolate egg, a fragile but overbearing cult in Knam's pastry shop.

easter eggs, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
easter eggs, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
easter eggs, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
easter eggs, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
easter eggs, ernst knam pastry shop, milan
easter eggs, ernst knam pastry shop, milan

They are not to be judged as ordinary chocolate eggs: they are as beautiful as you have ever seen, with harmonious proportions and solid workmanship.

Those who buy them do it, as we have said, for the power of representation, or at the other extreme of the gastrofighetta scale, because they are demanding to the point of trespassing into food fetishism.

Easter eggs Ernst Knam
Easter eggs Ernst Knam

Let's face it though: although in 71% Peru dark chocolate, 100% Criollo cocoa with mosaic inserts in chocolate and edible gold leaf, is it possible to sell an Easter egg for 120 euros without feeling a little shit?

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