An inside scoop on ice cream photography
Ice cream photography isn’t as chilled as it looks, so it’s a good thing our photographers know a thing or two on how to capture the coolest shots. Over at our Manchester studio, Chloe shares her tips on how to photograph ice cream.
Spoiler alert: There’s a lot more preparation than you might think!
Image to the left captured for Disotto’s Gelato.
Keep the room cool
It may be obvious but it’s important to keep the environment as cool as possible. That means no heating in the heights of winter and turning up the AC in summer. Whilst rocking up to the studio in 6 layers and constantly nursing a cup of hot tea may not be so fun, it beats having ice cream melting the second it hits the set.
There’s a few important steps to consider when capturing scoops of ice cream.
Be prepared: Pre-scooping ice cream the day before the shoot and storing them in the freezer helps the ice cream last longer on set. The scoops get really cold and will take a lot longer to start melting. It also saves time as we’re not having to create the perfect scoops on the day of the shoot.
As well as prepping the scoops in advance, we like to make sure that we have a lot of them. No two ice cream scoops are the same, by making back-ups we can guarantee that there’ll be the plenty of picture-perfect ones. Making sure they’re high quality, up to the job and comfortable to hold is important.
Styling and storing: Dry ice is essential on an ice cream set. The food stylist can work on top of dry ice whilst styling the ice cream to keep it frozen. Dry ice is also great for storing those pre-made scoops of ice cream. Storing ice cream on dry ice means that it can get really cold and you’ll start to see ice crystals on the ice cream. These can easily be removed by blowing on them through a straw. This technique is also a great way to get a bit of controlled melt and sheen on the ice cream.
Use a stand in: The final (and most important) tip for shooting ice cream is using a stand in. It can take a while to get the lighting and set just right and you don’t want ice cream standing on set whilst you’re doing that. A wad of wet kitchen paper can make a good stand in for a scoop of ice cream, as it can be shaped into a rough dome. This means we can make all the final tweaks to the shot before the stylist swaps in the real ice cream for the final shot and puts the cherry on top!
We’ve got the scoops, the tools, the studio and (more importantly) the experts, all in one place. If you’d like to book in a shoot – we’d love to hear from you. Contact the team.
There are many ways to create engaging food and drink videography, and luckily, we have the facilities to help you do so. Contact the team and we’ll have a chat to see what works best for your brand, products, and strategy.
How to get the perfect scoop of ice cream at home? You’ll need the right tool
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.
Cool off this season with our ongoing guide to the best frozen treats in Los Angeles.
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.
Our perfectly round ice cream balls also had to be hollow (to give the appearance of more ice cream than there really was in the globule atop the cone). To achieve this, you had to stop the glide as soon as the strip became a ball and not permit “extra” ice cream to spiral, creating a heavier portion. Part of the trick was to not dig too deeply into the ice cream and part was pulling in a smooth, even motion along the surface, almost shaving it rather than digging down as you might with a shovel in sand.
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 professionals and product reviewers today.
Reviewers on retail websites noted that the Zeroll easily produces beautiful round orbs that readily release from the scoop. The sleek handle is equally suited for righties and lefties; and there are no levers, sweepers or other moving parts to hamper the process or results. “Downsides” to the Zeroll? At $24.99, some called it pricey, and it is not dishwasher safe.
I evaluated a few of the other well-received scoops to understand the points of distinction among them. I focused on the Zeroll, the Midnight Scoop, the Sumo, the Spring Chef and the Thrifty. I did not evaluate dishers — those “scoops” with levers, sweepers and other moving parts that one squeezes to release the ice cream, save for the Thrifty scoop, which makes ice cream cylinders rather than balls and was developed locally.
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Except for the Thrifty model, the scoops all feature a single handle with a cup or shovel at one end and, except for the Midnight Scoop, which has a very heavy handle, all are reasonably comfortable in hand. The main differences are in the size and shape of the scooper cup, the weight and balance of the implement and its ability to produce perfectly round (though not necessarily hollow) scoops. I focused on the ease of scooping ice cream out of various containers, the ease of releasing the scooped ice cream from the device, attractiveness of the resulting scoops and the ease of cleaning.
Neither the Zeroll, which has many imitators, nor the Thrifty scoop is dishwasher safe; the other three are.
Although not always pretty or easy, the scoops I evaluated do get the ice cream from carton to cone (or bowl) without bending, as ordinary kitchen cutlery might. That said, the right scooper for you depends on a few key considerations, among them price, performance, dishwasher safety and the type of ice cream you prefer (which can significantly affect performance).
The “ergonomic” Midnight Scoop will run you almost $40. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
The Sumo Ice cream scoop costs only about $10. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Prices ranged from $9.96 for the “indestructible” Sumo to $39.95 for the “ergonomic” Midnight Scoop. The Thrifty cylindrical scoop with trigger is $26.99. When considering price, I would note that this is typically a one-time purchase and a few extra dollars can have a significant effect on the quality of your ice cream scooping experience.
To evaluate performance, I used pint, quart and “half-gallon” (actually 1.5 quarts) size containers of both chunky and smooth ice creams and a mix of premium (very dense) and “regular” (airier and less dense) ice creams. I focused on notoriously hard-to-scoop flavors such as chocolate and vanilla. I used the scoops on each type of ice cream and container size both straight from the freezer and after giving the denser, premium ice cream a few moments to warm up before scooping. I dug right into the center of the containers and also scooped around rather than across the container to get a more aesthetic result (ice cream at the outer edges is usually softer and easier to scoop than in the middle of the container). This is also useful when scooping from pint containers that don’t offer much space for scooping across.
All the scoops performed better with softer, regular ice cream that has a good deal of air churned into it. Still, even with softer regular ice cream, the Sumo, Spring Chef and Midnight Scoops produced slabs and hunks of ice cream rather than rounded orbs. Yes, you can pack a hunk into a ball, but the Zeroll does that without any extra effort, and even with very hard, straight-from-the-freezer ice cream, the Zeroll rather effortlessly glides through it.
The pointed Sumo bowl dug into very hard ice cream but didn’t get very far from there until the ice cream had warmed some. The unique shape of the Spring Chef — a squared-off shovel with thin edges — is supposed to plow through ice cream like it’s butter. Yes, it bulldozed through softened ice cream, but it did not make particularly attractive scoops without concerted effort.
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The Thrifty scoop looks like a staple gun with a steel cylinder attached where the staples would be ejected. To use it, you push the cylinder down into the ice cream, twist 90 degrees and then squeeze the handles as you would a staple gun. Though it does have a cult following, it is really best suited for commercial-size containers, as it requires a large surface area to be effective for more than one or two servings.
Bottom line: The Zeroll has been effortlessly scooping ice cream since 1933. I saw nothing in the other scoops I evaluated to convince me that any of them would perform equally well. None produced symmetrical round orbs with the grace and ease of the Zeroll. I don’t mind paying $10 to $15 more for a one-time purchase and I am happy to hand-wash such a small piece of equipment that serves me so well.
Yes, I’ll stick with the Zeroll, thank you.
