Ferriss's third book, The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life was released by Amazon Publishing in November 2012. The 4-Hour Chef contains practical cooking and recipe tips and uses the skill of cooking to explain his methods for accelerated learning, which he calls "meta-learning".
The book reached No. 1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list in its first week of issue. However, many brick and mortar bookstores including independents and Barnes & Noble chose to not stock the book due to their objections to the business practices of Amazon Publishing.