The Trick to Serving Ice Cream Like a High-End Restaurant

Ice cream comes in all kinds of flavors...and shapes, it turns out. When finessed into an oval with a cold, slightly wet spoon, it’s called a quenelle. You might’ve seen one on the The Bear’s second season, when pastry whiz Luca teaches Marcus how to scoop shiso sorbet using a spoon, or on your own plate at a high-end restaurant.

The quenelle isn’t just reserved for ice cream, though, and can be used to upgrade the presentation of any soft food, from whipped cream to mashed potatoes. Here’s everything you need to know about this culinary technique, including how to make your own. 

What is a quenelle?

Often used to plate food at fine dining restaurants, the quenelle is a smooth, oval shape that can be applied to sweet and savory dishes alike, but is usually reserved for softer foods like ice cream, tartare, or pâté.

The term “quenelle” at one time referred exclusively to an egg-shaped poached dumpling made with creamed fish, breadcrumbs, and an egg binding. This quenelle was name-dropped as far back as in De Re Coquinaria, a collection of Roman recipes dating to approximately the 5th century. The most famous version of the dish, the quenelle de brochet, is often credited to Lyonnaise pastry chef Charles Morateur, who is said to have whipped up a version with pike in the 1830s.

So, when did the term quenelle come to mean any oval-shaped portion? It’s hard to tell an exact date, but the shape of the quenelle de brochet likely inspired the name of the oblong scoops of ice cream or butter we see in restaurants and bakeries today. Legendary pastry chef Dominique Ansel even showed fans how to perfect the technique on his bakery’s YouTube channel.

How to make a quenelle

You can use one or two spoons to make a quenelle (the one-spoon method is sometimes called a rocher), but which to choose? Orlando Soto, the executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin in New York City, says it depends.

“There’s a two spoon quenelle which most savory chefs like to use a lot, where you press your caviar, your puree, whatever it is, between two spoons — shaving off the surface a little bit every time. You give it this very symmetrical, almost rhombus shape that you see in a lot of plating in late ‘90s and early 2000s Michelin kitchens across the world.” 

However, Soto prefers using one spoon — specifically a Rocher Spoon, which has a curved handle optimal for executing a sweeping wrist motion.

At Le Bernardin, Soto serves sorbet quenelles in flavors like strawberry, cucumber, lemon verbena, blackberry, and apricot, among others. But he doesn’t quenelle everything. “If I’m doing a dish that is meant to hit nostalgia rather than be froufrou and innovative and avant garde and all these things, I definitely prefer to do a [normal] scoop.”  

For those interested in making their next home dessert look restaurant-worthy, here are Soto’s tips to making the perfect quenelle:

• Work with the spoon you have: If you’re going to make quenelles often, investing in a dedicated spoon might not be a bad idea. However, you can use what you already have in the kitchen drawer. “The cool part is that you can get different shapes of quenelles depending on how long, how short, and how deep the shape of the spoon is,” Soto says. 
• Add some moisture: Soto recommends that your spoon be somewhat wet, so it doesn’t cling to whatever creamy ingredient you’re trying to scoop out and plate. On The Bear, Chef Luca advises dipping the spoon in warm water in between scoops. He also rubs the back of the spoon with his palm in between scoops to “charge it up” with some heat.
• Achieve the right ingredient consistency: Imagine digging into an impenetrable pint…and then make sure whatever you’re “quenelling up” does not have this texture. Per Soto, “you want to have it tempered enough: It can’t be rock hard or too soft. You could quenelle whipped cream — we do that all the time — but it has to be whipped to a certain stiffness for it to hold right when you’re trying to give it that shape.”
• Commit to the bit: At some point, you have to just go for it. “It’s just a matter of dragging down enough of the ingredient in question and carving it out,” Soto says. “I tell my cooks to carve out the amount that they need and then clean it off the side of the bowl or the container that they’re using.” Push the soft scoop away from you, wrap around with the spoon, and pull it back until you have a smooth, oval-sized scoop. Practice makes perfect!

Try this technique to scoop your favorite ice cream or “floating island” meringues. 

Does the shape actually matter?

Does the quenelle serve a purpose beyond an aesthetic one? It’s debatable. Gelato is gelato, after all, however you scoop it. 

Soto admits that being on the receiving end of a quenelle-shaped dish is not going to radically transform your taste experience. But of course, we first eat with our eyes, and a quenelle has undeniable visual appeal.

“The philosophy of most fine dining kitchens in Europe is about clean lines and very attractive shapes," says Soto. “Not to say that a sphere is unattractive, it’s just easier to tell when [it’s] wonky, so to speak. Whereas with a quenelle, you do have that proportionality.”