How to make quenelle at home

Ice cream comes in all sorts of flavors… and shapes, it turns out. When shaped into an oval with a cold, slightly wet spoon, it’s called a quenelle. You may have seen one on BearThe second season, in which pastry chef Luca teaches Marcus how to spoon shiso sorbet or serve it straight onto a plate at a fancy restaurant.

But quenelle isn’t just for ice cream, and can be used to enhance 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 it yourself.

What is a quenelle?

Often used for serving food in fine dining restaurants, the quenelle has a smooth, oval shape that can be used for both sweet and savoury dishes, but is typically used for softer foods such as ice cream, steak tartare and pâtés.

The term “quenelle” used to refer exclusively to an egg-shaped dumpling boiled in water, made with fish in cream, breadcrumbs and egg. The name of this quenelle appeared already in The Re Coquinariaa collection of Roman recipes dating from around the 5th century. The most famous version of the dish, skewer cubeIt is often attributed to the Lyonnaise pastry chef Charles Morateur, who is said to have prepared a version with pike in the 1830s.

So when did the term quenelle come to mean any oval serving? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact date, but the quenelle de brochet shape likely inspired the name for the elongated 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 one should you choose? Orlando Soto, executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin in New York, says it depends.

“There’s a two-spoon quenelle that most savory chefs like to use, where you squeeze the caviar, the puree, whatever it is, between two spoons—each time taking off a little bit of the surface. You give it a very symmetrical, almost rhomboidal shape that you see on a lot of plates in the late ’90s and early 2000s in Michelin kitchens around the world.”

But Soto prefers to use one spoon—specifically, the Rocher spoon, which has a curved handle that’s perfect for making wide wrist movements.

At Le Bernardin, Soto serves a sorbet quenelle in flavors like strawberry, cucumber, lemon verbena, blackberry and apricot, among others. But not a quenelle of everything. “If I’m making a dish that’s going to hit the nostalgia mark, and not be froufrou, innovative, avant-garde and all those things, I much prefer to make a (normal) scoop.”

For those who want their next homemade dessert to look restaurant-worthy, Soto offers some tips for making the perfect quenelle:

• Work with the spoon you have: If you plan on making quenelles often, investing in a dedicated spoon might not be a bad idea. Or you can use what you already have in your kitchen drawer. “The cool thing is that you can get different shapes of quenelles depending on how long, how short, and how deep the spoon is,” Soto says.
• Add some moisture: Soto recommends keeping the spoon slightly wet so it doesn’t stick to the creamy ingredient you’re trying to scoop onto your plate. BearChef Luca suggests dipping the spoon in warm water between scooping. He also rubs the back of the spoon with his hand between scooping to “charge” it with a little heat.
• Get the right consistency of ingredients: Imagine diving into an airtight mug… and then make sure that what you’re “putting out” is working NO have that consistency. According to Soto, “you have to have it tempered enough: It can’t be rock hard or too soft. You can quenelle the cream — we do it all the time — but it has to be whipped to a certain stiffness so that it holds together well when you try to give it that shape.”
• Get involved with the beat: At some point, you just have to do it. “It’s just a matter of taking enough of the ingredient and carving it out,” Soto says. “I tell my cooks to carve out the amount they need, then clean it off the side of the bowl or container they’re using.” Pull the soft spoon away from you, wrap it around the spoon, and pull back until you have a smooth, oval spoon. Practice makes perfect!

Try this technique by scooping your favorite ice cream or meringues into the shape of a “floating island.”

Does shape matter?

Does the quenelle have any other purpose than aesthetic? That’s debatable. Gelato is gelato, in the end, no matter how you scoop it.

Soto admits that eating a quenelle-shaped dish won’t radically change your taste experience. But of course, we eat with our eyes first, and a quenelle has an undeniable visual appeal.

“The philosophy of most elegant kitchens in Europe is clean lines and very attractive shapes,” says Soto. “I’m not saying a sphere is unattractive, it’s just easier to tell when it’s crooked, so to speak. But with a quenelle, you have that proportionality.”