A guide to cooking that is really a guide to learning any skill quickly, with recipes along the way
Learning to learn, through cooking
Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, never learned to cook, so he used cooking as an experiment in rapid learning. The result is a huge, playful book that teaches basic kitchen skills and simple recipes while explaining a general method for mastering any skill fast. It ranges from domestic cooking to foraging, hunting, food science and techniques borrowed from professional chefs.
Who will enjoy it
Curious beginners who want to learn to cook and readers interested in learning techniques and self-improvement.
What you will get
An energetic, unusual mix of cookbook and learning manual that teaches real kitchen skills while giving you a toolkit for picking up almost any new skill much faster.
The 4-Hour Chef Facts: Pages, Genre and Setting
Genre
Nonfiction · Cooking · Learning · Self-improvement
Length
672 pages · ≈ 20 h
More about this book
Ferriss built his reputation with books about doing more with less effort. Here he turns to cooking, admitting that he was hopeless in the kitchen, and treats it as a test case for learning anything quickly. The book opens with a section on meta-learning, where he presents his framework for breaking a skill into small parts, choosing the most useful ones, putting them in the best order and creating stakes to stay motivated.
The cooking itself is organized into sections named for different settings. The domestic section teaches a short sequence of simple recipes, each building one or two essential techniques, such as searing meat, braising and making quick sauces, with minimal equipment. The wild section covers foraging, hunting and preparing food outdoors, while the science section explores unusual techniques and kitchen experiments. The professional section shares advice and recipes from respected chefs. Along the way come photographs, charts, sidebars about memory and language learning, and many personal stories.
Sprawling, fun and full of ideas, best dipped into rather than read cover to cover. About 672 pages in a heavily illustrated hardcover.
The 4-Hour Workweek
The Food Lab
Kitchen Confidential
Game Dog
Water Dog
Plenty
Gun Dog
The Koehler Method of Dog Training
Culture Clash
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life