The Super Simple Ice Cream Scooping Tip You Need To Remember

Ice cream is one of life's simplest treats. All you need is a couple of scoops piled into a crunchy cone, or a dish and a spoon, and you can cool off with one of the world's most favorite desserts. Americans especially love the scoop-able stuff, and the average person in the U.S. eats around four gallons — or 20 pounds — of ice cream every year, according to the U.S. Census. There's a little bit of an art to digging out the perfect round scoops, however. It's important to keep ice cream cold enough so that it doesn't lose its signature texture, but not so cold that the ice cream is too hard to scoop.

If you arm yourself with a traditional metal scoop, let your container warm up for a few minutes at room temperature, and start scraping from the sides where the ice cream starts melting first — you'll be scooping perfect spheres like a food stylist in no time.

It's human nature to want to dig into an ice cream carton right away to get at the good stuff, but the pro move is to take the container out of the freezer and let it warm up for five to ten minutes. If you don't wait, it's like scooping cement. You'll know when it's time to scoop when you can gently squeeze the container. Once the sides start to soften, you can use your scoop to scrape away the softer ice cream at the edges first, working your way toward the middle.

Be careful not to let your ice cream actually melt, however, or your frozen treat will become a milky soup that can't be saved by refreezing. Ice cream is more than just frozen cream and sugar with flavorings mixed in; it's actually an emulsion of fat, water, sugar, ice, and air. If you think of other emulsions, like mayonnaise and vinaigrettes, you know that without some mechanical whipping with a whisk or a blender, the disparate ingredients won't blend together. For ice cream to get its signature creamy texture, it's almost always mixed in an ice cream machine, which spins the ice cream base around in a cylinder at a certain temperature to break up any ice crystals and whip air pockets into the mixture. This is important to know because if you let your ice cream melt, the air will escape and you'll lose the texture.

The best tool for getting perfectly round scoops of ice cream is the old-fashioned style metal scooper as you see in scoop shops. The shape that was popularized by Zeroll in 1935 has a C-shaped bowl, and the aluminum handle is filled with a liquid that warms up and distributes heat from your hand to the bowl. If you eat ice cream often, it's a must-have tool in your kitchen, even though it only does one job. You might have also been told that you should dip your scoop in warm water before you scoop, but not only is that not necessary since there's a liquid inside your scoop that warms up, but dipping your scoop in water will leave a thin glaze of ice behind in your ice cream, which causes crystals.

When your ice cream is warmed up and you can squeeze the container (but the ice cream isn't melted), push the side edge of your ice cream scoop into the softened side of your container of ice cream and start scooping. To get that perfectly-shaped ball, work the scoop in an "s" shape, using a continuous swiveling motion.

It takes a little practice to get the perfect scoop shape, but even if you don't get it right the first few times the results will still taste just as good.