COMPETITOR

Shropshire Lad

HEAD COOK: Adam Purnell

COMPETITION: World Live Fire Championship

Back in 2017 Adam started his YouTube Channel ‘Shropshire Lad’ after being convinced to do so by a friend, showcasing his outdoor cooking adventures in the rural county of Shropshire, England. Five years on, what started out as simply sharing his passion for cooking with fire, quality local ingredients, and of course Shropshire and it’s incredible food scene, has become his fulltime profession since making the tough decision to finish his career as a Youth and Community Worker back in February 2022. Adam has now established a solid reputation as a live fire chef, delivering pop ups and events, hosting and demonstrating on fire cookery stages across the UK, delivering regular public classes in the art of cooking with fire, building a following across multiple social media platforms and making several television appearances. These include winning Heston Blumenthal’s show ‘Crazy Delicious’ on Netflix and channel 4, a guest slot on Nadia Hussein’s BBC show ‘Fast Flavour’ and more recently as a critic on UK MasterChef the Professionals where he was described as ‘one of the leaders in the UK street food and pop-up scene’. In May 2023 Adam opened Embers, a cafe and events space that offers accessible fire cooking in cafe style setting, a woodland lodge in Ironbridge, Shropshire. Cafe by day, and events space by night at Embers Adam hosts a variety of different themed nights and chef collaborations. There is also a fire cookery school on site, with a regular offering of bespoke cooking courses all bases around the different mediums within live fire gastronomy. Adam’s style is to ‘not mess about’ and simply take the best of the ingredients available, allow bold natural flavours to collide and then introduce them to the fire to, ‘elevate flavours to levels that cannot be achieved in a normal kitchen’.