The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life [Print] [Hardcover]

Timothy Ferriss (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 20, 2012

“If you crossed Jason Bourne with Julia Child, you’d end up with Tim Ferriss.” – Marco Canora, Chef-Partner of Hearth & Terroir

“Wildly inventive.. [a] rangy, obsessive immersion in food and its many wonders. [T]he tools needed to learn to cook well can be deployed in every manner of endeavor, from skinning a deer to memorizing a deck of cards. The author distills them into minimal, learnable units and examines how to order the units so as to keep readers engaged in their endeavors. Ferriss is a beguiling guide to this process, at once charmingly smart aleck-y and deadly serious, and he aims to make readers knowledgeable and freethinking.” - Kirkus Reviews

"Tim Ferriss distills kitchen wisdom like a rotary evaporator on power surge. The results are potent, lucid, and delicious." - Nick Kokonas, Co-Owner, Alinea, Next, The Aviary

WHAT IF YOU COULD BECOME WORLD-CLASS IN ANYTHING IN 6 MONTHS OR LESS?

The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning.

#1 New York Times bestselling author (and lifelong non-cook) Tim Ferriss takes you from Manhattan to Okinawa, and from Silicon Valley to Calcutta, unearthing the secrets of the world’s fastest learners and greatest chefs. Ferriss uses cooking to explain “meta-learning,” a step-by-step process that can be used to master anything, whether searing steak or shooting 3-pointers in basketball. That is the real “recipe” of The 4-Hour Chef.

You'll train inside the kitchen for everything outside the kitchen. Featuring tips and tricks from chess prodigies, world-renowned chefs, pro athletes, master sommeliers, super models, and everyone in between, this “cookbook for people who don’t buy cookbooks” is a guide to mastering cooking and life.

The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning:

1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential.

2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare.

3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive.

4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder.

5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as “self-rule.” In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Enjoy a Sampler Platter of The 4-Hour Chef

Click on thumbnails for larger images

Tim learns about selecting the best cuts at Dickson's Farmstand Meats.	At Dickson's Farmstand Meats, Tim gets tips on the art of butchering from an in-house expert.	Tim prepares to make Bistecca Alla Panzanese.	He coats the meat with grapeseed oil and seasons both sides with salt and pepper.

Harissa Crab Cakes, a quick appetizer that showcases the flavors of chili and lime.	The ingredients for Mashed Coconut Cauliflower with Cashews--mashed potato mouthfeel without the guilt.	Tim prepares succulent Herbed Sous-Vide Turkey Legs with thyme, sage, garlic, and butter.	These White Chocolate Chip and Pistachio Cookies have a delectable flavor and texture.

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About the Author

Tim Ferriss is author of the #1 New York Times best sellers The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body. He’s been called “The Superman of Silicon Valley” by Wired, one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and “the world’s best guinea pig” by Newsweek, which ranked him in its top 10 “most powerful” personalities on the 2012 Digital 100 Power Index. He is an adviser and faculty member at Singularity University, based at NASA Ames Research Center, which focuses on leveraging accelerating technologies to address global problems. Tim’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, and The New Yorker, among many others.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: New Harvest; 1 edition (November 20, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547884591
• ISBN-13: 978-0547884592
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.9 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,319 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Quick & Easy
  • #4 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Culinary Arts & Techniques
  • #85 in Books > Education & Reference

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

634 of 690 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Zen and the Art of Just About Everything November 20, 2012

By Debra Eve

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Tim Ferriss tells you right off that this isn't a book about cooking, just like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't about Zen or changing oil. He'll teach you how to handle a knife and make a few interesting dishes, but mostly he takes you on a long, strange, self-indulgent, and sometimes useful trip.

What I enjoyed:

-- Ferriss's storytelling. He has a nice way with words: "Mangalitsa acorn-finished woolly boar tasted just like acorns. I was chewing on fall, clear as crystal, in a sliver of cured ham."

-- His emphasis on the slow food movement and local, organic farming. (But strangely, his "Clean 15" foods include sweet corn, which is mostly genetically modified.)

-- His language hacking tips, which are gold. I've always wanted to master several languages and found his methodology solid and logical.

-- The 140-character Twitter recipes from almost every country in the world: fun, simple, and intriguing.

What I didn't like:

-- Ferriss's tangential teaching style. At one point he goes from braising to English's 100 most common written words to kickboxing to chess to tango spins in order to emphasize the importance of selection and sequencing. It didn't work for me, because I often lost track of the original concept.

-- His foray in into survival and hunting skills, just so you can make your own venison burger. (If you want some cricket protein bars, however, you'll need to mail order the crickets.) This section could have been a separate book and might have been fascinating as a metaphor/methodology for learning entrepreneurial skills.

-- His unrealistic (for the busy person) science experiments, such as making arugula spaghetti using a syringe and flexible tubing just to avoid that dreaded white flour. (Though some of his cocktails in the same section sound delicious.)

If I were to sum up this book in one word, it would be "manic": excessively enthusiastic and somewhat disorganized. Ferriss is obviously a curious and driven guy. I came away feeling he gets satisfaction from the ability to tackle and master anything, but not joy.

136 of 157 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book but extremely random and reads more like a magazine November 25, 2012

By N. Ziaie

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am a fan of Tim Ferris but I have to say that this book over promises and under delivers. Ferris is the master of marketing and hype and even teaches you his techniques on his blog so it is very easy to pick out what he did. Here are some of my thoughts on the book.

- The book claims it's not a book about cooking yet 80% of the content is food related. He talks a lot about meta-learning but doesn't really dive into learning types and just gives generic learning tips.
- The book reads almost like a magazine and jumps all over the place as you progress through.
- Random mens magazine style tips (how shoot a jumpshot??, Knifes, guns, camping etc) I feel like I'm reading a GQ magazine.
- Really big book, the formatting is good but some of the pictures looked very amateur.
- You can tell he didn't write a lot of content of the book. Ferris is the master of outsourcing yet he makes it seems like he is the jack of all trades.
- Tons of pages of recipes (I thought this wasn't a cookbook?)

...more later as I progress through the book.

Overall I would say that it is a very entertaining book but I didn't find it more educational than any magazine you can pickup off the newsstands.

51 of 60 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Big disappointment December 12, 2012

By Thomas Hilmersen

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I loved The 4-Hour Work Week, I liked The 4-Hour Body, and I dislike The 4-Hour Chef. Tim Ferriss rambles on and on about a multitude of subjects, jumping all over the place with his thoughts, images, charts, etc.. A book about learning, and nothing but learning, would have been very interesting. A book about survival, too. Or one about cooking good food easily and with little equipment. Ferriss goes the farthest in attempting the latter, but I believe he fails miserably. He writes pages and pages about cutting and the like, to the extent that I quickly got bored and did not want to continue reading. Finally, there was something that caught my interest; how to make an excellent cup of coffee. But what is this?!? To make that awesome coffee, I need some kind of fancy equipment that I have never heard about or seen anywhere, which is probably not even available outside of the USA and parts of Europe. Indeed, if I was to follow Ferriss' recommendations, I would end up with a huge closet full of new, expensive stuff - which is precisely what I have been trying to avoid during the past years. The simple fact is that cooking can be made a lot simpler, and that tons of special equipment is not necessary. I suggest that Ferriss stay off the strong tea or coffee, calms down, and creates a more organized, focused and valuable book the next time.