Breville
Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker
- Bottom Line
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Owners get consistent results time after time with this feature-packed model.
- Pros
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Reliable results with 12 hardness settings for making everything from gelato to frozen custard. Sensors maintain optimal firmness of contents for up to 3 hours. Has both automated and manual settings.
- Cons
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Some don't like its noisy operation. Included scooper is on the short side.
About the product
A compressor ice cream maker that takes all the prep work out of making frozen treats
Making homemade ice cream is a lot of fun, but waiting at least 16 hours for an ice cream maker’s bowl to freeze can be a pain. The Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream eliminates that issue with its own built-in compressor that chills and churns the ingredients at the same time. That means you can make ice cream whenever you want without any prep work.
The Smart Scoop offers a dozen hardness settings, including automatic options for sorbet, frozen yogurt, gelato and ice cream, so you can customize the texture of your desserts. It also has a Keep Cool setting that can keep your ice cream chilled if you’re not ready to eat it right after churning.
To see if the Smart Scoop lives up to the hype, the BestReviews Testing Lab put it to work making sorbet, gelato and ice cream and found it to be the most convenient of all the ice cream makers we tested. However, if you don’t plan to use it regularly, its high-end price may be tough to justify.
What is the Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker?
Product specifications
Churning Time: 50 to 55 min | Maximum Yield: 1.1 qt | Dimensions: 16.2” L x 7.2” W x 10.7” H | Weight: 30 lb | Ease of Cleaning: The paddle and lid are dishwasher-safe, but the ice cream bowl requires hand-washing
The Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker is a compressor-style ice cream maker. Unlike traditional electric ice cream makers that require chilling their bowl in the freezer for 16 to 24 hours, it can chill and churn your ingredients at the same time. That means you can decide to make ice cream whenever a craving strikes without any preparation at all. It also has 12 hardness settings. In Auto mode, you can choose a specific dessert, and the machine automatically churns it to the proper consistency. In Manual mode, you can decide how firm you want the dessert to determine how long it churns.
The Smart Scoop’s capacity is on the smaller end for home ice cream makers, producing just 1.1 quarts per batch. Other electric ice cream makers can make between 2 and 4 quarts, so they may be better options for families. However, if you have children, they’ll certainly appreciate the lack of pre-freezing time because you can make a batch of ice cream in as little as an hour.
To see how the Breville Smart Scoop compares to other products in its space, check out our review for the best ice cream makers.
Price and where to buy
The Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker regularly retails for $499.95. You can find it on Amazon.
Why we like it
No prep needed
Our favorite thing about the Breville Smart Scoop was that we didn’t need to freeze anything before we made our ice cream. It can chill and churn simultaneously, so we didn’t need to freeze a bowl for 16 hours or our ingredients for 24 hours beforehand. For most recipes, we could decide to make a certain dessert and have it in an hour or less.
Easy to use
Despite having one of the most elaborate interfaces among the ice cream makers we tested, the Smart Scoop was pretty easy to use. The Auto settings are the most user-friendly, but even the Manual options were straightforward. The machine also alerts you when it’s time to add mix-ins or start churning after pre-cooling.
Excellent texture and flavor
The Smart Scoop produced smooth, creamy ice cream across all the recipes we made. Like most home ice cream makers, the consistency was like soft serve, so we needed to firm it up in the freeze for an hour or so to make it scoopable. However, we never had any issue with ice crystals in our desserts, and the flavor was outstanding across the board.
Keep Cool setting
The Smart Scoop’s Keep Cool setting kept our desserts at the same firmness or texture for up to three hours after churning, so we didn’t have to transfer them to the freezer immediately.
High-quality construction
The Smart Scoop is certainly bigger than most of the other ice cream makers we tested, but it is also one of the best in terms of appearance and build quality. Its stainless steel design looked great on our testing area’s counter, and the machine felt sturdy and well-built.
What we don’t like
Price
Spending nearly $500 for an ice cream maker just isn’t in everyone’s budget, despite how convenient the Smart Scoop may be.
Size
The Smart Scoop is pretty big, similar to a small toaster oven, so it takes up a great deal of counter space. And it’s also heavy, making it challenging to pull in and out of a cabinet.
Capacity
The Smart Scoop makes just 1.1 quarts of ice cream per batch, less than the capacity of most other ice cream makers we tested. That’s why it may not be the best option for large families or entertaining.
Imprecise hardness settings
The Smart Scoop boasts 12 hardness settings, but we didn’t notice much difference between them, particularly when used manually. Even the hardest setting, Ice Cream, wasn’t as firm as store-bought ice cream and required additional freezing to reach a scoopable texture. Ultimately, the hardness settings only determine how long the ice cream is churned.
Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker setup
Ice cream makers aren’t usually very difficult to set up, but the Breville Smart Scoop was the easiest model we tested. It was fully assembled in the box, so we only had to remove the bowl, paddle and lid to wash them before use. After replacing them in the machine and plugging it in, we were ready to make ice cream. The entire process took less than five minutes.
Prep time
Unlike other ice cream makers we tested, which require either freezing their bowl for at least 16 hours or the ice cream ingredients for 24 hours, the Breville Smart Scoop didn’t require any pre-freezing before we could make ice cream. The lack of prep time was highly convenient because we could make ice cream whenever we wanted.
However, for all the ice cream makers we tested, we chilled the ice cream base in the refrigerator after mixing for one to two hours before adding it to the machine. With the Smart Scoop, we chilled the mixture for about 45 minutes. We also used the Pre-Cool feature to bring down the machine’s temperature before adding the ice cream base to the bowl, but it only took about five minutes to bring down the machine’s temperature to -22 degrees.
Churning time
The Breville Smart Scoop took longer to churn sorbet, gelato and ice cream than the other ice cream makers we tested. Most models needed between 20 and 30 minutes to produce ice cream with a soft-serve texture. During testing, the Smart Scoop needed 52 minutes to make chocolate ice cream, 48 minutes for vanilla ice cream, 26 minutes for sorbet and 38 minutes for gelato.
We definitely noticed the longer churning times for the Breville Smart Scoop, but we felt like it was a pretty fair tradeoff. Taking up to twice as long for churning as other machines didn’t seem like a big deal, considering we didn’t have to worry about freezing a bowl or ingredients for 16 to 24 hours ahead of time.
Flavor and texture
We made lemon sorbet, mint-chocolate gelato, chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream in the Breville Smart Scoop.
Our lemon sorbet’s flavor was perfectly balanced between sweet and tart, and the soft, creamy texture was light and refreshing. Our mint chocolate had a wonderfully rich taste, but its texture wasn’t as dense as store-bought gelato. Still, it was creamy and smooth, though ultimately, we didn’t notice much difference between it and the ice cream we made, except that the gelato was a bit softer. The chocolate ice cream had a delicious, rich flavor, even without any added chocolate pieces, while our vanilla ice cream had a light, sweet taste. Both reached a creamy, soft-serve texture right after churning. None of the desserts we made contained any ice crystals or chunks.
Ultimately, all the recipes we prepared in the Breville Smart Scoop benefited from an hour or two in the freezer. Fresh from the machine, the sorbet, gelato and ice cream were a bit too soft. However, that was our experience with nearly all the ice cream makers we tested, so the Smart Scoop performed just as well as the others when it came to texture.
Hardness settings
The Breville Smart Scoop offers 12 hardness settings. We could use the Auto settings for sorbet, frozen yogurt, gelato and ice cream or manually choose a setting. During testing, we found it easiest to opt for the Auto settings because the machine determined the proper churning time for our chosen dessert without us having to think about it.
Overall, the manual hardness settings seemed a bit useless during testing. All the desserts usually needed time in the freezer after churning because they were on the softer side, which wasn’t uncommon among the ice cream makers we tested. However, the difference between the gelato and ice cream settings didn’t seem significant enough to show up in the dessert’s texture after putting it in the freezer for an hour or so. So, while the hardness options may seem like a cool feature, we found them a bit gimmicky in the end.
Keep Cool feature
The Breville Smart Scoop’s Keep Cool feature is designed to maintain the temperature and consistency of a dessert for up to three hours after churning. We used it for two hours after making our chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Neither ice cream melted, so both maintained the same soft-serve consistency they had right after churning.
We found this feature pretty handy, especially when we couldn’t transfer the ice cream from the machine to the freezer right after we made it. It would also work well if you made ice cream for a party or other gathering and wanted to serve it straight from the machine.
How does it compare to other ice cream makers we’ve tested?
The Breville Smart Scoop is certainly the most convenient ice cream maker we tested because it didn’t require any pre-freezing. The Cuisinart Pure Indulgence Automatic Ice Cream Maker, Cuisinart ICE-21 Ice Cream, Frozen Yogurt & Sorbet Maker and the KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker Attachment all require freezing their bowl for at least 16 hours before making ice cream. Similarly, we had to freeze our mixed ice cream base for at least 24 hours when making desserts in the Ninja Creami Deluxe. As a result, we had to plan ahead with the other machines. Thanks to its built-in compressor, the Smart Scoop allowed us to make ice cream whenever the mood struck.
The Smart Scoop had a slightly smaller capacity than the other ice cream makers we tested, making just 1.1 quarts per batch. The Cuisinart ICE-21 makes 1.5 quarts, while the Cuisinart Pure Indulgence and KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker Attachment both have a 2-quart capacity.
When it came to texture and flavor, the Smart Scoop made ice cream that was very similar to the other models we tested. Its ice cream was slightly firmer than the Cuisinart ICE-21 but had the same soft-serve texture as the Cuisinart Pure Indulgence and KitchenAid. The Ninja Creami Deluxe was the only machine that made firmer ice cream than the Smart Scoop.
The biggest mark against the Smart Scoop compared to other models is its price. It retails for nearly $500, so only the Ninja Creami Deluxe, at $249, comes close. The Cuisinart ICE-21, Cuisinart Pure Indulgence and KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker Attachment are all $100 or less.
Testing the Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker
We tested the Breville Smart Scoop by preparing lemon sorbet, mint-chocolate gelato, chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream. For the sorbet, gelato and vanilla ice cream, we used the Auto settings. For the chocolate ice cream, we used the Manual hardness settings. We used the Pre Cool feature for all the recipes except the sorbet, so we could note any differences in the process. We also noted the churning time for each dessert, as well as the flavor and texture right after churning. Additionally, we placed each in the freezer for one to two hours after churning to determine how the texture changed. Finally, we used the Keep Cool feature for the sorbet and the vanilla ice cream to see how long the desserts could sit in the machine without changing texture or consistency.
After we made each dessert, we cleaned the Smart Scoop. We washed all the components by hand, using the included bottle brush for the paddle, and recorded how long the process took.
Should you get the Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker?
Hands down, the Breville Smart Scoop is the most convenient ice cream maker we tested because it doesn’t require any pre-freezing. That allows you to make ice cream whenever the mood strikes, which can definitely come in handy if you’re making ice cream with impatient kids. All the desserts we made in it were delicious and had a nice creamy consistency, too.
Its price is a serious sticking point, though. At nearly $500, it’s not the best investment for people who don’t make ice cream regularly. It probably isn’t a good fit for smaller kitchens, either, because it takes up more counter space than other models. So if you only make ice cream for special occasions, you can definitely find a more affordable model that’s easier to take in and out of the cabinet but still makes delicious ice cream.