How Much is Inside A Scoop of Ice Cream?

Ice cream is one of the few foods which is measured in scoops. Not ounces or servings, scoops. Scoops! But how much is IN the scoops, and how many scoops are in the container? No one knows.

On Saturday night, thirteen years ago, we decided to find out.

Allow me to take you back in time, to June 2001. Visiting Jen in Berkeley, we attempted to shoot photos for two articles in one night.

We decided to describe "how much is inside Magic Shell" and "How much is inside a scoop of ice cream".

This plan was doomed from the start.

The problem with experimenting/photographing ice cream is that you have only a brief window to get your project finished before all the ice cream melts.

To shoot one series of photos, no problem. Two series? Impossible.

In 2001, ice cream was sold in full half-gallon cartons.

In 2001 you could tear the carton in half lengthwise along a perforated seamline. This half-gallon of mint ice cream had already passed our Magic Shell testing and had been drawn into our scoop test.

The scoop on hand wasn't typical. It was petite.

The scoops weren't distinct in the bowls, so I switched to cones. How many cones could a half-gallon of ice cream fill?

The bowls and cones were a mess, the scoop size wasn't standard. What a disaster. We vowed to try again and threw all this away

into our mouths.

Fast forward to last week, 2014. Ice cream containers have shrunk a bit, mostly around the corners of the box.

Modern manufacturing processes have allowed us to finally create blue and pink cotton candy ice cream.

I was confident these colors would show up well in our photos. I was also confident this ice cream would taste terrible.

Working quickly, I scooped ice cream onto the cones. This is my idea of what ice cream cones should look like.

Your culture may vary.

What kind of product melts before you can serve it all? Better question: What kind of monster dishes out 11 ice cream cones at a sitting?

Here's that number again. Eleven scoops of ice cream per 56 ounce (1.75 quart) container... plus a half-portion of cotton candy ice cream soup.

Yes! Experiment complete! All these years later I had found the answer! A great weight was lifted off of my shoulders.

Now the weight is down around my midsection.

If you get eleven scoops of ice cream out of a $3.49 box of ice cream, each scoop is 31¢. The cones are less, 18 for $2.29, or 13¢ each.

The cone pictured must have been smaller than the average, because it is only about 100 grams (The cake cone weighs 6g). I was surprised to find that cotton candy ice cream is actually very tasty! I ate the cone and licked the scale!