In this book, I’ll give a condensed summary of Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Chef. The book itself is already a condensed summary of the culinary arts, as well as how he learns. And there’s just too much dense information to cover properly.

So in this post, I’ll:

• Give a brief summary in the first section of the 4 Hour Chef, which is the most important part AKA how to learn faster than everyone else.
• Chat about the 2^nd part of the book, which are delicious, yet easy recipes that Tim gives.

If this condensed summary of a condensed summary interests you, I 100% recommend you grabbing the book (and perhaps I’ll get 69 cents in commission if you buy it, at no cost to you) for tons more information.

Summary Of Meta-Learning In 4 Hour Chef

“Meta-learning” is learning how to learn. Hence, meta. Knowing how to learn efficiently is good because you’ll save tons of time.

Consider this: do you want to spend 20 months learning a new language, or 8 weeks? Do you want to spend 5 years learning how to code, or 2 weeks? This section gives a framework on how you can pick up skills and get close to world-class performance in the shortest amount of time possible.

First, Materials Beats Methods

Materials refer to ‘study materials’ or reference materials.

Methods here refer to study methods.

Suppose you’re studying a new language. And you’re very studious. I hand you a dictionary so you can memorize all the worlds.

Now instead suppose I handed you a cheat-sheet of 12 sentences that’ll demonstrate some of the most common words used and will demonstrate all the grammatical rules of the language.

Which material do you think will yield better results in a shorter amount of time? The dictionary or the cheat sheet?

The latter is exactly what Tim Ferriss did:

Here are the 12 sentences, the “Deconstruction Dozen”:

The apple is red.

It is John’s apple.

I give John the apple.

We give him the apple.

He gives it to John.

She gives it to him.

Is the apple red?

The apples are red.

I must give it to him.

I want to give it to her.

I’m going to know tomorrow.

(I have eaten the apple.)16

I can’t eat the apple…

…I was once en route to Istanbul and did the 12-sentence audit with a friendly Turk across the aisle. There was a layover before my connecting flight, and I wandered over to a Rosetta Stone language kiosk. I asked if I could try their Turkish demo, which the woman was kind enough to let me test-drive for 15 minutes. I skipped to a Level 3 test, which is intended to be taken after 120–150 hours of study, and scored more than 80% correct. In addition to saving me time, that 30-minute, 12-sentence audit saved me $399.

Can’t argue with results. The study material you choose beats hard work and study methods, every time.

The second point is this: even though material beats method, you still need a method. More specifically, your method of learning must be effective and sustainable.

You could have the best material in the world, but if you can’t study it because you’ve prescribed yourself too overwhelming of a schedule, then the material is of no use.

Optimal learning = best materials + effective study regimen.

The best materials are what Tim Ferriss refers to ‘high frequency’ materials – or materials whose contents can be applied to an almost alarmingly high amount of situations. And the most effective study methods is the ones that you can actually keep up with.

Optimal Learning Framework Summary In 4-Hour Chef: DiSSS

The framework to learn fast is coined as “DiSSS” by Tim Ferriss. This stands for:

• Deconstruction: breaking down the big problem into the smallest learning units. This is figuring out “what do I even need to learn to grasp this stuff?”
• Selection:  Leveraging Pareto’s principle – what 20% of these learning units will yield 80% of the results?
• Sequencing: Given you only have 20% of the original learning units, which order should you study them in that’ll make the most sense?
• Stakes: How do I set up consequences that guarantee I follow the study program?

Deconstruction consists of coming at your monolithic task from all kinds of angles. The angles in the book include:

• Pattern recognition, so you can ‘group’ one big/vague task like a language into a bunch of smaller tasks. Tim gives the example of learning 1945 Japanese characters quickly by realizing that 1) there’s always a certain order you write those characters, and that there are only 2) 214 radicals in the Japanese language that clue you in on what the word means. In other words, you can use pattern recognition to reduce the task of memorizing 1945 characters to 214, or about 10X less. Or realizing that most languages’ grammar rules can be broken down with a 12-sentence pattern.
• Interviewing outliers, so you can get insights that aren’t commonly discussed. More specifically, you should interview outliers that 1) got really skilled very quickly (since this is what you’d like to replicate), and 2) are the 2^nd best (since the best generally has their schedule booked full).
• Reversing the steps on how to do stuff. Just google “reverse” or “upside-down” + <whatever skill you’d like to learn>. Reversing how one does things means necessarily breaking down the procedures so you can reverse it. A lot of times, this can build tons of foundational insights on what you’re trying to learn. In Tim’s case, he learned to build a fire that’s the reverse of a regular “tepee fire” and his result is fiery heat that lasts 3-7 hours without any maintenance. It also leaves no ashes, meaning everything is converted to heat. Conversely, a regular tepee fire that they teach in Boy Scouts often require adding more wood during the course of burning, and leave tons of ashes.

Suppose you now know all the things that you need to learn. How do you select what to learn? The answer is simple: just pick between the intersection between easy and most useful. In Tim’s example, he found that there’s 3 cooking methods that are the most popular: grilling, sauteing, and braising. He found this through the technique of deconstruction/interviewing.

You want to start with the most useful skills, since learning those few skills can allow you to do much more than a set of less useful skills. But what sequence should you learn them in?

You should start with the ‘base case’ / easiest cases first. The reasons for this is because:

1. You want early wins so you’d be internally motivated to keep going.
2. The easiest are also the most foundational. And foundational things can inform / make learning much harder things a lot easier.

Thus, in the above cooking example the learning order should be from easiest to hardest:

1. Braising (easiest since you can mess it up quite badly and still end up with really great results)
2. Sauteeing
3. Grilling

As discussed in my summary of The Art Of Learning, chess endgames are much easier / less overwhelming to learn than the thousands of chess openings out there. Yet, learning in this way gives a chess player a much deeper understanding of chess (even when there are many chess pieces on the board).

Another example: Tim Ferriss accelerated his learning of Tango so that he went from 0 to semifinals in the World Championship within 6 months. How did he learn so fast? He learned the woman’s role first so he can more deeply understand the nuances of the men’s role in Tango.

Stakes: This is the last step and not really something I personally believe in. But Tim Ferriss says you need the ‘stick’ instead of ‘carrot’ to encourage yourself to do stuff. One way to do this is to give money to some website that’ll donate to an anti-charity (i.e. an org you hate) if you don’t accomplish your goals. And if you accomplish your goals, you get the money back.

Pick your “anti-charity.” If you prefer the tried and true, the top-yielding anti-charities on stickK, in descending order, are:

1. The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum

2. Americans United for Life

3. NRA Foundation

4. Institute for Marriage and Public Policy

5. NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation

I have no political association with any of the above. Them’s just the facts, ma’am. Feel free to pick anything that gets your knickers in a twist.

The reason why I don’t believe in using stakes to motivate yourself is twofold:

1. Discipline is a very entry-level problem. If you don’t have discipline you’re not going to do it, no matter what.
2. If you have enough discipline to go ahead and sign up for a site that’ll donate your money to an anti-charity should you not accomplish your goals, you probably have enough discipline already.

But for the most part, I think deconstruction, selection, and sequencing are helpful. Stakes is optional in my opinion.

What About The Damn Food? 4 Hour Chef Summary Of Some Recipes

The book has tons of recipes. Buy the book if you want all of it. But what I LOVE about this book is that it starts out with very easy recipes, and it’s all very tasty.

The first recipe is ‘Osso Buko’, or oxtail. If you’ve been to Italy, you know how delicious this shit is. Instead of using expensive oxtail, he recommends using lamb shank as a cheaper, yet still very delicious substitute. From there, you only have a total of 6 other ingredients, some of which you should already have in your pantry:

1. A bunch of carrots
2. A can of whole tomatos
3. Cloves of garlic or pinch of garlic powder.
4. EVOO (2 tablespoons)
5. Cheap white wine.
6. Salt/pepper to taste.

Toss all of this into a dutch oven, throw it in an oven for 2-4 hours, and eat. Can be stored for a few days, and the leftover gets even more delicious the longer you live it in the fridge (most optimal being 3 days in the fridge).

I can attest to this recipe personally. And I can attest to a bunch of other recipes being easy to execute and also very tasty.

The food portion of the book progresses like so:

1. Give you easy recipes to build confidence.
2. With each new recipe, you’ll learn at most 1 more skill.
3. The recipes are tasty and inexpensive.

After this easy food / recipe portion, Tim goes on a tangent on how to survive in the wild (I’ve no idea why). Then he resumes the cooking conversation with much more advanced techniques that are more commonly used in fancy, Michelin-star restaurants. Some examples include:

• Using gels, like turning arugula into a gel so you can form spaghetti with it.
• Foam techniques, like turning beet juice into foam.
• Solvent techniques, like how to infuse bacon into whiskey.
• And a lot more.

After this hard section, he ends up with an even harder section showing you how to do extremely complicated recipes, some inspired and/or created with the guidance of folks from Alinea. The foods in this section ranges from French omelettes to food beyond your wildest imagination. Think: cigar-smoked milk mixed into hot chocolate spiked with tequila. But the point of this section is to introduce you to the most advanced concepts and skills in cooking.

I’d say if you’re looking for tasty food, and an easy, relaxed progression with good tasting food all the way without an insanely long recipe book with a billion ingredients that’ll destroy your wallet: GET. THIS. BOOK.

And if you’re looking to progress way beyond and cook like a 3-star Michelin chef: still, get this book.

Summary Of 4 Hour Chef And Review

The TLDR version of this book goes like this:

• Great book for recipes and cooking techniques. This book will advance you from basic cooking skills to extremely advanced ones if you so choose.
• Good book if you like accelerated learning and/or if you’ve looked at the Art Of Learning and like those ideas. Only this book is much more condensed than Art Of Learning so might be easier to consume. See here for Art Of Learning summary.
• A lot of the book isn’t relevant to me (namely, the survival stuff and the advanced cooking techniques) so I skipped them. Feel free to skip those sections and come back later and use those sections as a reference should you want to up your cooking game.

Review: 5/5 stars. Get this if you like learning, or food. Don’t get this if you like learning slowly and/or hate food.