Duncan McLachlan on ethically produced charcoal: 'The difference in taste is incredible'
The wild cooking advocate tells Suzy Pope how he stepped away from conventional cooking and blazed an award-winning trail with Ember, his live-fire street food business
Chef and long-time wild cooking enthusiast Duncan McLachlan makes his signature panuozzo sandwiches using live fire, often cooking against a biting east coast wind. It’s hard work, the hours are long and the weather doesn’t always play ball. But would he trade it in for a restaurant kitchen? Not a chance. ‘To be honest, I thought street food was going to be easy compared to fine-dining restaurant cooking…’ McLachlan admits of his Ember food truck operation.
He began his culinary career aged 15, working in his family’s hotel restaurant in St Andrews. When it closed in 2022, he took a head-chef job at a fine-dining establishment and quickly decided that inflexible, intense kitchen hours weren’t for him, especially with a young family. ‘I’m working even harder now than when I was doing 16-hour shifts in restaurant kitchens,’ he admits, ‘but I wouldn’t go back.’ Between chef shifts, McLachlan would head for the hills to clear his head, bringing a bivvy bag or hammock and cooking on an open fire: he wasn’t about to settle for a pack of instant noodles. ‘I’d always bring something really nice to cook. I learned to make some spectacular food with nothing but a campfire.’ This is where the idea for Ember took shape, taking cooking back to analogue: at his food truck, everything is cooked on a charcoal grill or in a wood-fired pizza oven.
All of this is not without its challenges, not least the Scottish weather. ‘Wind is the real killer. It’s worse than rain,’ McLachlan insists. ‘When wind howls directly into the pizza oven, the wood burns too quickly.’ He calls it a pizza oven but has never actually had pizzas on the menu; his passion is for Italian panuozzo, a Neapolitan sandwich made with folded sourdough pizza dough. ‘I just love the idea of making bread to order,’ he says. The bread is baked in the wood-fired oven while fillings such as medium-rare chimichurri steak and crispy porchetta are done over a charcoal grill.
Finding sustainable charcoal for his grill was also a task. ‘A huge proportion of the world’s modern slavery is tied to the production of charcoal. I wanted to find an alternative that didn’t contribute to that situation.’ He uses briquettes made from hazelnut shells and ethically produced charcoal, free from chemicals and burning agents. While regular supermarket charcoal needs to turn white before you can work on it, to ensure all the chemicals have burned off, you can cook on pure charcoal while it flames. ‘You could eat this charcoal safely if you wanted to. I don’t understand why you’d go to the trouble of buying the best meat, the finest cut of beef to grill, then ruin it with cheap charcoal. The difference in taste is incredible.’
This attention to detail could be what secured Ember its win at the Scottish Street Food Awards, and second place at the British Street Food Awards, where his porchetta panuozzo also won best sandwich. ‘In the beginning, I wanted to make refined restaurant plates in the food truck. But I realised that’s not what street food is.’ Popping up at venues across Fife, including Howe Beer Project in Balmalcolm, Bowhouse near St Monans, The Newport Inn, and Craigtoun Meadows Holiday Park outside St Andrews, Ember embraces exactly what street food should be: simple, no need for a knife and fork, and focused on good ingredients, right down to the charcoal.
Find out more on Ember's Instagram.