LIVING | REVIEWS My first job was waitressing at a family restaurant and ice cream shop. Among my duties was dishing out the ice cream cones, sundaes and banana splits ordered by the guests seated in my section. Most ordered ice cream for dessert after lunch or dinner.
Some came in exclusively for ice cream. Suffice it to say, I became an ace ice cream scooper practically overnight. Much of what allowed me to scoop ice cream so masterfully was the actual scooper.
Unlike the levered demi-dome with-a-sweeper scoop of my childhood (which never functioned properly ) , the scooper at the restaurant was a metal cylinder about six inches long, which served as the handle, with a C-shaped cup at one end — for gathering the ice cream — and a round, colored plastic ball embedded in the other end to indicate the scoop size. The handle — actually the entire scoop — was hollow and filled with a heat-conductive fluid that responded to body heat and warmed the scoop just enough to create a bit of melt that allowed an easy entry point into even very hard ice cream and then to rather effortlessly glide through it. As you pulled the scoop, a rounded strip of ice cream curled back on itself to form a ball, which was then easily deposited onto a cone or into a sundae dish.
When I started researching ice cream scoops recently, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the very same scoop I used all of those years ago — the Zeroll Original Ice Cream Scoop — is a favorite among culinary p.