JACK MUNN

I’m so excited to share my new project with you. Gather Round is an evolving cookbook and cooking platform where I’m putting everything I’ve ever learnt about cooking and hosting into one place. Recipes broken down by real occasions like date nights, midweek family dinners and Sunday lunches. Alongside that, Cooking 101s to help you host with confidence and actually enjoy cooking for other people. It’s built around the idea that food can be used as a function of care and connection. If you fancy having a look, the link is in my bio. There’s a five day free trial, no strings attached, and plenty of free recipes too. ENJOY!

I fell in love the first time I ever made a lasagna. Not in the way you may be thinking. It was the first time I’d spent hours on a dish, and the satisfaction I got from placing that dish in the middle of the table and feeding a crowd was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Fast forward to now, my cooking has slowly but gradually gotten better, and so has my lasagna.

STEAK CAFÉ DE PARIS BUTTER, HOMEMADE CHIPS 🥩 Cafe de Paris Butter is one of those things which you can only have every so often, otherwise you’re asking for King Henry levels of gout. However… when you do make it, you’ve gotta go all out. Spiced and punchy, this butter should be flavour packed and is something I come back to time after time. One for date night or with the boys… Enjoy! Ingredients Chips 3-4 Maris Pipers or King Edward potatoes Chicken fat (Jar)/ A large pour of vegetable oil 1 Steak of your choosing roughly 500g for two people Butter Handful tarragon Handful parsley 7-8 Sprigs of thyme (leaves only) Tbsp mustard 4-5 anchovies depending on preference with some oil 250g salted butter Tbsp Garam Masala Zest and juice of 1 lemon 3 cloves garlic 1 Tsp Worcestershire sauce Method below!

This is the Street Food Alphabet, episode 2, and today, we’re making BIRRIA TACOS A wise man once said “Sometimes, the viral ones really are as good as they look”. That wise man was @samsational_eats . Chopped sandwiches, feta pasta, pesto eggs. All disappointments in comparison to these bad boys. But there’s a reason for that. Birria isn’t some passing fad born out of social media. It’s a 500 year old tradition from Jalisco. Then sometime in the 1950s, some genius had their lightbulb moment and stuffed this beautiful stew into tacos with molten cheese before frying them in their own oil. This is tradition, not just a viral trend.

The street food alphabet, episode 1. Yes, I’ve done Ayam Goreng before. And it was delicious, BUT, it was not authentic. This is closer to something you’d really have in Indonesia. The most special part of this dish comes from the little shards of batter made from lemongrass, shallots and other aromats, that act like little garnishes of crunchy onion bhajis. It’s seriously stunning.

Truly the best pie you will ever make. My steak, pancetta and mushroom pie, with a beautifully rich base made of ale. My signature dish… if you want the full recipe, it’s over on my new platform, Gather Round. You know where to find it!

#Ad Smoked pulled pork shoulder on the Ninja Woodfire Pro Connect. Literally all I had to do was season it, set it, and let the app do all of the work. 4 hours later you’ve got proper woodfire flavour, fall-apart pork, and zero stress. I shredded mine through hoisin and stuffed into brioche buns with slaw, cucumber and spring onions and it was perfect @ninjakitchenuk #WoodfirePRO

After far too much umming and ahhing over episode 17 of the Curry Alphabet, I’ve made a call. We’re spelling it Qorma, not Korma, so this spice-shy classic finally gets its rightful place. Is it cheating? I’ll let you decide. Either way, this is everyone’s guilty pleasure, whether you’re willing to admit it or not.

What happens when you mix a bread boy with a curry guy and feed them 10 beers and a bottle of champagne? You get butter chicken stuffed naans. Wild? Maybe. Genius? Definitely. Because there’s never been a food made worse by putting it inside bread. Change my mind. You won’t. You can’t. Even if you did I’d never admit it. Recipe: - 7g active dried yeast - 2 tsp golden caster sugar - 300g Canadian strong white bread flour - 6g salt - 25g melted ghee, melted - 150g Greek yogurt Method: - Activate the yeast in your warm water with the sugar - Combine salt and flour in a mixing bowl - Add both mixtures together with the yoghurt and knead until well combined - Add melted ghee and mix until you have a very smooth doughy that is not sticky to touch - ball and leave to prove for one hour or until doubled in size - roll out and fill with cheese and cold curry of choice, before sealing and leaving to prove for another 30 minutes Fry in a medium-hot pan until GBD on both sides and piping hot all the way through - tear open like the starved barbarian you are and throw down your throat with lashings of beer. If you get a cheese pull fair play to you because we ripped all 3 open with absolutely 0 success. #baking #food #dareyoutotryitifyourenotscared

This is the best Sandwich in the world, and the Vietnamese call it, the banh mi. It starts with the French baguette, brought over during the colonisation of Vietnam. The Vietnamese upgraded it, making it crispier, fluffier, and filling it with ingredients that blow your palate away. We love the French cuisine, but we love it even more when one takes a cuisine defining element and makes it their own. The goans did it with the Portuguese ‘Carne de Vinha D’alhos’ turning it into the Vindaloo. And the Vietnamese did it with the humble baguette.

The Curry Alphabet, Episode 16. Phall 🌶️ This one is NOT for the faint of heart. But it is delicious nevertheless. If you love spice, then this is the one for you. If not, I would suggest doing everything in this recipe apart from adding the chillies. Phall is one of those curries that was born out of the British curry house scene rather than back in South Asia. It’s generally traced to Bangladeshi chefs in places like Birmingham, who were already making things like vindaloo and thought, how far can we push this? So phall became less about tradition and more about bravado. A curry built to be stupidly hot, often using fresh chillies, dried chillies, even extracts, layered into a thick, tomato-based sauce. It’s not something you’d really find being cooked at home in Bangladesh or India. It’s a challenge dish, a bit of theatre, and very much a product of British curry culture rather than a centuries-old recipe.

The Curry Alphabet Ep 15. Oxtail Peanut Curry I have historically hated peanuts all my life. So much so that I used to believe I was allergic because I hated them so much. That was when I was about 8, but 20 years down the line, I still can’t face a bag of KP dry roasted peanuts. What I can deal with however, is a satay skewer. That sauce has slowly been opening my eyes, so much so that I wanted to create a curry using that exact flavour. This is the result. A slow cooked oxtail curry in a peanut sauce, and it is to die for.