Jamie Oliver’s chicken and sausage stew fries diced chicken breast, halved sausages and pancetta golden, simmers them in tinned cherry tomatoes and borlotti beans with purple sprouting broccoli, then tops the whole pan with rosemary-garlic sourdough chunks and grills it until golden and bubbling. It serves two, takes 20 minutes, and comes in at 862 kcal.
The recipe is from Jamie’s 20-Minute Meals (2012). Three proteins in one pan (chicken, sausage and pancetta) sounds excessive, but each brings something different: the chicken is lean and mild, the sausage adds herby fat and seasoning, and the pancetta gives smoky, salty crunch. Between them, you get a stew that tastes like it’s been building flavour for hours.
The sourdough topping is the move that turns a tin-based stew into something special. You pound rosemary, garlic, lemon zest and olive oil in a mortar, scrunch torn bread chunks through the mixture, then scatter them over the stew before grilling. They crisp into a rough, herby crust that shatters when you push your spoon through, which is a different thing from a separate side of toast.
Jamie Oliver Chicken & Sausage Stew
Course: Dinner, LunchCuisine: BritishDifficulty: Easy2
servings8
minutes12
minutes862
kcal20
minutesJamie Oliver’s 20-minute stew from Jamie’s 20-Minute Meals: chicken, sausages and pancetta in cherry tomatoes and borlotti beans, topped with rosemary-garlic sourdough and grilled golden. A one-pan, two-person weeknight feast.
Ingredients
1 x 150g free-range skinless chicken breast
2 rashers of smoked higher-welfare pancetta
2 higher-welfare sausages (130g)
1 x 400g tin of cherry tomatoes
1 x 400g tin of borlotti beans
160g purple sprouting broccoli
½ a bunch of rosemary (10g)
2 cloves of garlic
1 lemon
2 large slices of sourdough bread (100g each)
Directions
- Fry the proteins:Turn the grill on to high. Heat a large shallow ovenproof casserole on high with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. As you go, chop the chicken into 6 pieces, halve the pancetta and sausages, and add everything to the pan. Cook for 9 minutes, stirring occasionally, until golden.
- Build the stew:Tip in the cherry tomatoes, then the beans with all their juice and 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar. Bring to the boil, trim and add the broccoli (halving any thicker stalks), and leave to simmer.
- Make the topping:Strip the rosemary into a pestle and mortar and pound with a pinch of salt. Peel and bash in the garlic. Grate in the lemon zest, muddle in half the juice and 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, and season. Tear the bread into bite-size chunks and scrunch with the mixture.
- Grill:Season the stew, scatter over the herby bread and carefully transfer to under the grill for 5 minutes, until golden, bubbling and cooked through. Serve with lemon wedges.
FAQs
Why three different meats in one stew?
Each one does a different job, which is why it tastes more complex than a single-protein stew. The chicken breast gives lean, white-meat chunks. The sausages add herby, seasoned fat that melts into the sauce. The pancetta brings a smoky, salty, cured-pork depth. Together they build a layered flavour in 9 minutes of frying that a single ingredient can’t match.
Oliver fries them all together from the start, which lets the sausage and pancetta fat flavour the chicken and the pan base. It’s the same storecupboard-meets-butcher approach behind his pressure cooker bolognese, where mince and lentils share the load.
What kind of sausages should I use?
Good-quality pork sausages with a high meat content work best, since cheap sausages can fall apart in the stew and leave a grainy texture. Oliver specifies “higher-welfare” sausages, which usually means a better-quality banger with coarser meat and more flavour.
Herby sausages, like Cumberland or Lincolnshire, add their own seasoning to the stew, which saves adding extra herbs to the base. Italian-style sausages with fennel also work well here. Avoid anything too heavily spiced or flavoured (chorizo, for instance, would overwhelm the other meats).
Can I use different greens instead of purple sprouting broccoli?
Yes. Purple sprouting broccoli is seasonal (late winter to early spring in the UK), so swap it for tenderstem broccoli, regular broccoli florets, cavolo nero or kale, all of which cook in the same time and wilt into the stew nicely. Cut thicker stems in half lengthways so they cook through evenly.
The greens go in with the tomatoes and beans and simmer while you make the topping, so they only need a few minutes. Don’t overcook them: you want them tender with a bit of bite, not khaki and mushy, since their freshness is the counterpoint to the rich, meaty base.
Why scrunch the bread with the rosemary mixture?
It coats every chunk in the garlic, rosemary, lemon and olive oil mixture, so when they grill, each piece crisps into a fragrant, herb-crusted crouton rather than a plain bit of toast. Scrunching with your hands presses the dressing into the bread’s crumb, so the flavour goes all the way through.
Oliver uses the same grilled-bread-on-top-of-a-stew trick in his bread and borlotti bean soup, where the sourdough goes into the soup itself, and here, where it goes on top. Both are ways of turning stale or day-old bread into a proper component rather than a side.
Do I need an ovenproof pan?
Yes, since the stew goes from hob to grill with the bread on top. A large shallow enamelled casserole or a stainless-steel pan with no plastic handles is ideal. If your pan can’t go under the grill, spoon the stew into an ovenproof dish, scatter the bread over and grill that instead.
The large, shallow shape matters for the grilling: it gives maximum surface area for the bread to crisp evenly. A deep, narrow pan would leave most of the bread stacked in the middle, steaming rather than grilling.
Can I double it for four people?
Yes, and the method stays the same: double everything, use a bigger pan, and give the proteins an extra minute or two to brown since they’ll be more crowded. The grilling step also takes slightly longer with a larger surface of bread to crisp.
For a full meal for four, serve it after a simple starter like his tomato and feta lentils or alongside a green salad. For pudding, the sticky orange chicken shares the same fast, punchy spirit if you want another quick Oliver recipe the same evening, though honestly this stew is filling enough to stand alone.
