Patience is key for making impressive jelly desserts. That’s something Thu Buser, a Brooklyn-based chef and culinary artist, learned at an early age while watching her mother spend hours preparing batches of rau câu, a Vietnamese dessert featuring delicate, colorful jelly layers. Now Buser creates her own highly stylized jellied desserts, multicolored variations on the rau câu she enjoyed growing up. She injects fruit juices into pristine clear jelly, producing bursts of color and flavor: a kaleidoscope of vibrant green coconut-pandan, a sunset-hued yellow yuzu-lychee, a riotous fuchsia coconut-ube. “Buser says, ‘I can make any flavor pretty.'” Her syringe serves as her paintbrush, applying delicate sweeps and precise staccato jabs to the cooling agar-based gelatin. This is all done essentially blindly, as the injections are performed from the bottom of the mold.
