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

by Timothy Ferriss

“When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.” And: “Good cooking is no mystery. You don’t need years of culinary training, or rare and costly foodstuffs, or an encyclopedic knowledge of world cuisines. You need only your own five senses.”

“We have clients come to us and say, ‘Here is our average customer.’ For instance, ‘Female, she is 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids,’ and we listen politely and say, ‘Well, that’s great, but we don’t care…about that person.’ What we really need to do, to design, is look at the extremes. The weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest, the fastest person, because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.” In other words, the extremes inform the mean, but not vice versa.

think design concept

Sometimes, whether in the world of fire-making or cooking, finding the path of least resistance is as easy as Googling “backward,” “upside-down,” or “reverse,” plus whatever skill you’re deconstructing.

use fat, not water, to counter hotness. Capsaicin is fat-soluble.

play with foodpairing.be, which is based on the Volatile Compounds in Food (VCF) database. The objective is to start thinking about how to mix and match foods based on similar characteristics.

A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn’t depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.

The easiest way to avoid being overwhelmed is to create positive constraints: put up walls that dramatically restrict whatever it is that you’re trying to do. In the world of work, a task will swell in complexity to fill the time you allot it, a phenomenon often referred to as Parkinson’s Law. How does so much get done just before you leave for holidays? All the items lingering on your to-do list for weeks or months? It’s the power of the clear and imminent deadline. Though vastly simplified, in the world of cooking, Le Chatelier’s Principle is invoked to remember that a gas will expand to fill the size of its container. So…all we have to do is create a tiny container: the wonderful one-pager.