Hello from our new Cooking editor Cody Reiss

Dear L.A. Times Food reader,

Hello! My name is Cody Reiss, and I am the new Cooking editor at L.A. Times Food.

Perhaps you’re wondering: Who are you, and what is it exactly that you’ll be doing here?

Great questions!

I’ll give you the short version first: I’m a cook, a writer and an eater. I’ve been cooking for a while, but really learned how to cook at the Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkeley. My new role at L.A. Times Food will have me making cooking videos and writing this newsletter, but my overall goal and dream for my work here is: to teach you how to be an intuitive cook.

Now, the long version …

A bit about me — I was born in coastal San Diego and raised on California burritos, fish tacos and sunburns. Cooking has never come naturally to me. I didn’t grow up sitting on the counter watching my grandma roll handmade pasta or adjust a Sunday gravy. I was raised by a busy single mom and the extent of my youthful cooking rarely reached beyond the can opener, the microwave or — later in high school — the very elaborate, stoned smoothie parfait.

It wasn’t until I took a year off of college to go traveling that I really fell in love with cooking through eating and exposure to new cuisines, flavors and foods I’d never encountered before. When I returned home, I set out to try and re-create these foods in my own kitchen. It was mostly a disaster — I’d follow recipes, but everything I cooked ended up all wrong. Cooking felt like a language I just didn’t understand.

I was amazed watching my talented friends cook — walking into the kitchen, rooting around the fridge and cupboard, and putting together a nice meal from what they had on hand. That was the kind of cook I wanted to be, and I think that’s honestly the goal for most people: to cook food, with pleasure, to one’s own taste. But how to get there?

As I started staging (interning) in restaurants and cooking more at home, I was aching to understand the reasoning and the principles behind good cooking. Why would I use apple cider vinegar instead of red wine vinegar? How does fermentation work? Curing? Searing? Braising? Seasoning? For me, it’s always been helpful to zoom out and understand cooking from a bird’s-eye, conceptual point of view — why and how something works.

I think of cooking a lot like music. When I first started playing guitar, I took lessons where I learned to play a handful of songs (“War Pigs” … “Over the Hills and Far Away” …) note for note. Eventually they started sounding pretty good, but I couldn’t play anything besides those songs. It wasn’t until I expanded my theoretical knowledge of music — learning scales, different genres, improvising with more talented musicians — that I started gaining the tools to create my own music.

At Chez Panisse, I learned to approach cooking in much the same way — not just as a collection of recipes, but as a personal, mindful and intuitive creative act. Following recipes is a great way to expose yourself to new cuisines, perspectives and methods, but gaining a theoretical understanding of the principles of cooking — basic techniques, fundamental principles and all the inflection points and adaptations along the way — is really the key to becoming an intuitive cook who can prepare food to one’s own taste.

Working the salad station at Chez Panisse

(Cody Reiss / Los Angeles Times)

And so, that is my goal here. I want you to become more comfortable with your tools, more familiar with your ingredients and more present with your process. I want to give you conceptual and practical ways to better understand the levers of control you have at your disposal, all these useful things that an experienced cook draws on when they step into the kitchen, so that you can read between the lines of a recipe and start to cook intuitively. There will, of course, be recipes, and I hope you’ll use them as inspiration, a jumping-off point and a way to put theory into practice. It’ll be fun, I promise — like a mini cooking school!

I also want to say — I am still always learning. My hope is that we can learn together. Please feel encouraged to drop me a comment and let me know what you’re excited to learn more about, or anything that’s ever confusing or unclear. I want to make my work here as useful and enriching for you as possible.

For now, go out and get yourself a big box of kosher salt, and I’ll be back next week to tell you why it’s time to throw your salt shakers and grinders in the trash.

Talk soon,
Cody

P.S. The Cooking newsletter, starting next week, will come out on Friday instead of Sunday, to give you some ideas going into the weekend. :)

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