Buy at AmazonThe best ice cream scoops make it easy to produce attractive scoops of ice cream and sorbet. The Zeroll Original 2 oz Ice Cream Scoop is our winner. It’s comfortable to hold and glides through both hard, dense ice cream and lighter, airier ice creams. It was even a breeze to use with icy raspberry sorbet or to maneuver around big chunks of toffee and it produced beautiful spherical scoops.
There’s a reason your favorite ice cream parlors aren’t using regular old spoons when slinging cones and cups. A great ice cream scoop is less taxing on your arms and hands when scooping ice cream for prolonged periods of time. With both hard, dense ice cream and light, airy ice cream, a well-designed ice cream scoop should produce beautiful round scoops that release easily into a bowl or cone. Some people may reach for a portion scoop to scoop ice cream, but their thin metal levers are more prone to breaking when used on firm, frozen ice cream or sorbet; we recommend leaving those for portioning cookies and muffins. An ice cream scoop may do only one job, but unless you’re just sneaking bites straight from the pint (which, in the comfort of your own home, by all means) a sturdy ice cream scoop is something that no ice cream–loving household should be without.
A great ice cream scoop is the key to achieving picture-perfect cones and cups.
We found ice cream scoops with listed volumes of 1 ounce all the way up to 4 ounces. If you’re solely scooping from pint containers, a 2- to 3-ounce scoop will fit best and be easiest to maneuver. If you buy containers of ice cream that are a quart or more, a 3- to 4-ounce scoop may be best, but it comes down to personal preference.
All the scoops we tested had heads made of metal—either aluminum, zinc, or stainless steel—and a few switched to plastic for the handle. Some had very spherical heads, while others more closely resembled a rounded shovel. One even included a heat-conductive fluid inside the body to supposedly help the user scoop hard frozen treats. We scooped dozens of containers of ice cream and sorbet and invited a local ice cream shop owner, Kristen Rummel of Honeycomb Creamery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to weigh in on what separates a good ice cream scoop from a bad one.
Kristen Rummel, owner of Honeycomb Creamery in Cambridge Mass., visited the test kitchen to help us test ice cream scoops.
What to Look for
- A Spherical Head: Professional ice cream scoopers aim to create a nice ball of ice cream with a neat, classic look, explained Rummel. With enough patience, it’s possible to use virtually any ice cream scoop to manually build a round shape against the side of the container, but the pros don’t have time for that and neither do we. Scoops with a distinctly spherical shape allowed the ice cream to roll back on itself as we pulled them through containers of ice cream or sorbet, which helped us efficiently form a picturesque ball with less effort.
- Heat-Conducting Materials: We preferred ice cream scoops with built-in features that made it easier to scoop ice cream. Our top-rated ice cream scoop was made of aluminum, which itself is an excellent conductor of heat. The body also contained food-grade mineral oil, which conducts heat from your hand and slightly softens the ice cream. When we scooped pints of dense ice cream, these features helped the scoop dig in and glide more easily.
- A Comfortable Handle: When dishing out multiple portions of ice cream at a time, say at a dinner party or to top slices of pie at the Thanksgiving table, an ice cream scoop should make your job easier and more comfortable. We preferred models that had smooth and/or grippy handles that didn’t dig into our hands.
What to Avoid
- Shovel-Like Head: Some scoops were shaped like a shovel with a square head. These models could dig into the surface of a pint, but they weren’t very adept at forming a pretty orb of ice cream. They instead carved a channel into the ice cream, so the resulting scoops were a little messy and uneven.
- Levers: One ice cream scoop had a unique lever that hinged forward to propel the ice cream out of the scoop. It was unnecessary, as other models without levers released scoops just as well, or even better, and the lever prevented this model from gliding smoothly and made it difficult to clean.
The Tests
- Scoop dense, firm vanilla ice cream from pint containers into small bowls
- Scoop light, airy vanilla ice cream from 1.44-quart containers into small bowls
- Scoop raspberry sorbet from pint containers into small bowls
- Scoop coffee toffee crunch ice cream from pint containers into small bowls
- Scoop chocolate ice cream from pint containers into sugar cones
How We Rated
- Performance: We evaluated whether the ice cream scoops were able to make attractive, round scoops with smooth ice cream, chunky ice cream, and sorbet.
- Ease of Use: We assessed whether the scoops were efficient, comfortable to hold and use, and easy to clean.
