Jamie Oliver releases new 20-minute meal recipes

Jamie Oliver has long promoted the idea of healthy home cooking, done quickly. His cookbook 30-Minute Meals, released in 2010, proved that making nutritious dinners at home can be easy, fast and affordable. A couple of years later, he dialled up the pressure with 15-Minute Meals. Both books aimed to give people a repertoire of quick dishes that could feed the family well without having to fall back on pricey or unhealthy takeaway foods.

Now, the superstar British chef has found the sweet spot, with the release of 20 Minute Meals: Real Fast Food. This new collection, and its companion TV series, aim to find that balance between cooking at a relaxed pace, while being quicker and more convenient than ordering home delivery.

“I want to give people as many excuses as possible to just keep cooking,” he says. “Twenty minutes is achievable … It’s long enough to actually make progress, but short enough to be manageable.”

With increasingly busy lives, and the temptation to order in, it’s easy to think younger people may not have the time or inclination to cook at home. But Oliver insists many people want to have those skills, and can carve out the time to learn them. And with the right recipes and ingredients (including some handy pantry items), cooking from scratch can actually be more achievable than people realise.

“These are recipes that can be made in 20 minutes, at a calm, enjoyable pace, and often in our recipe testing we found people were doing them in 12, 15, 17 minutes,” he says.

“I want it to be achievable and I want people to be motivated to give more than one recipe a try, so I knew the time limit was important. If in testing, it couldn’t be done by one of our testers in 20 minutes, then the recipe didn’t make it into the book.”

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Here, Oliver shares three recipes that can be on the table in 20 minutes or less, including a filo “quichy” for two, a pizza fritte duo and Thai chicken soup.

Veggie love: Simply ditch the ham!

Energy 566kcal; fat 29.8g; sat fat 8.9g; protein 34.6g; carbs 44.4g; sugars 4.9g; salt 1.8g; fibre 6.6g

Energy 506kcal; fat 22.2g; sat fat 8.1g; protein 18.9g; carbs 61.5g; sugars 3.3g; salt 5.5g; fibre 1.7g

Energy 614kcal; fat 36.9g; sat fat 17.9g; protein 43.1g; carbs 26.8g; sugars 5.9g; salt 0.8g; fibre 6g

20 Minute Meals: Real Fast Food by Jamie Oliver is published by Penguin Michael Joseph © Jamie Oliver Enterprises Limited (2026, 20 Minute Meals: Real Fast Food). Recipe photography: © David Loftus, 2026.

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