How to master that knack for simple yet revelatory cooking

In his first cookbook, Andy Baraghani instructs cooks on how to trust their instincts.

Cooking by instinct is often heralded as the secret to becoming a better home cook, but not everyone is born with a cooking intuition. It can be taught, however, and there’s no better teacher than Andy Baraghani. I’ve been friends with Baraghani for over 10 years now, and he’s one of the few people I know whose cooking I would eat with no question — and that’s because he has a great cook’s knack for knowing just how to create simple but revelatory dishes.

In his first cookbook, called “The Cook You Want To Be,” the Bay Area native and former Bon Appétit food editor and video star not only shows readers how he cooks — with luxuriously vibrant photos of his colorful, enticing dishes — but how they can hone that instinct for themselves in their own everyday cooking.

In a crunchy salad of sliced fennel, he walks you through possible substitutes so that if you don’t have one of the requisite ingredients he calls for, you