she explains but none of that is necessary anymore and it takes half the day to prepare something artificially styled for panera bread with real panera bread they make us weigh every ingredient valentin says these days its about taking the real food and showing it off to its best possible but real advantage if the burger in the mcdonalds commercial looks better than the one you get thats because theyre making it super fresh right at the moment she says everything is nudged forward on the bun and the bun itself is the most perfect possible bun one that hasnt been squished by paper but it is a bun from their assembly line she promises you have to let the food do what it naturally does its a live animal you cant make it into something that its not if theres a kind of bread that makes a lot of crumbs when you cut it you need to show the crumbs she says i guess thats my thing i want the food to be comfortable with itself not that she doesnt have a few tricks up her sleeve i use glycerin to represent condensation because you have more control over it than water she says shell use a garment steamer to remelt congealed cheese on a tiredlooking cheeseburger it melts again and it looks perfect once when her team couldnt get danjou pears for a shoot they substituted another kind of pear faking the danjous coloring with lipstick i think mine was loreal british red its the perfect lipstick for the danjou pear mostly though its the real thing and if you spent several hours at the grocery store picking out the platonic ideal of lettuce and painstakingly arranging each leaf your salad could look like that too valentin characterizes her aesthetic as natural i guess thats my thing i want the food to be comfortable with itself she says the art of the grocery store for most of us grocery shopping is a chore for valentin its an art some people just hand the shopping to their assistants but i love it her store of choice is marianos whole foods opens too late though she also has a network of specialty wholesalers whom she can turn to when she needs something impossible somebody always wants to shoot a pomegranate in july and its just not out there at the store shes meticulous you have to go through all the tomatoes that have beautiful green tops and hopefully a little stem and you have to treat them like little newborn babies she tells me shopping for hamburger buns means taking them all off the shelf looking through them all and putting the rest back you get the poor stock kid watching you do this like oh man what is this crazy woman up to im a visual person valentin says i think visually i learn visually thats just how my brain works