Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker Review

The Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker is a reliable machine which is consistent in performance, and it has a sleek — if large — presence on the countertop. It offers 12 customizable settings so that you can control the hardness, as well as style, of any frozen dessert, including ice cream, sorbet, frozen yogurt and gelato. This is more control than most ice cream makers offer. 

However, at $499, this is one of the more expensive machines we’ve tested for the best ice cream makers. Read the rest of our Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker review to see how this popular machine compares, and if it’s worth the investment.

Breville Smart Scoop review: Price and availability

The Breville Smart Scoop retails for $499.95, and it rarely goes on sale (though Amazon usually has it around the $480 range). You can buy it from the Breville website directly or from retailers like Williams-Sonoma, Sur La Table and Crate & Barrel. The only color option is stainless steel. 

Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker Specs review: Design

While its appearance is sleek and streamlined, the Breville Smart Scoop is large and heavy at 32 pounds. This is a harbinger of its durability, but it isn’t remotely portable as a consequence. It is rectangular in shape, measuring 15.75 x 11 x 11 inches, and the settings are visible on the LED screen. 

There’s just one single, and very unobtrusive, control knob on the top which you use to select one of the 12 frozen dessert settings — this adjusts the hardness for ice cream, sorbet, frozen yogurt and gelato. There’s several additional control buttons surrounding the display too, including pre-cool and keep-cool settings to preset the temperature or maintain it. I didn’t use the pre-cool setting on my first batch; using it on my second batch only saved me about five minutes in total though. Keep cool will keep the machine churning for three hours if needed. The controls are very responsive and easy to use, and the progress bar lets you know how close the ice cream is to being finished.

Plastic parts are sturdy, well-constructed and are BPA-free. It comes with a cleaning brush, removable bowl (but, oddly, no lid for storage), paddle and instruction manual (with recipes). The cord is only 18 inches long, so you have to have considerable counter space near an electrical outlet, but it does mean there’s less to store.

Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker review: Ease of Use

No assembly is required beyond placing the bowl in the machine and locking on the cover — it really couldn’t be simpler. One control knob, which turns left to right, determines the hardness of your final product, otherwise you just set the timer and hit start. There’s an automatic timer included as well if you don’t want to set this manually. All of the machine’s features can easily be understood without having to look at the manual. The process is the same whatever type of ice cream you make. 

The manual is thorough and detailed, and the website also has a video version if needed. The instructions give good tips for mix-ins, so that you can avoid common pitfalls. There are a number of recipes included too, with lots of ideas for kids. Classic recipes were a bit less in-depth though; I had to seek out a custard recipe, for example, as it wasn’t included in the book. But, any recipe will work with the Smart Scoop.

The plastic and metal parts are easy to clean and dishwasher-safe, so there’s no need to hand wash once you’re finished.

Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker review: Performance

What you’re really paying for here is the compressor, which freezes your recipe on the spot (i.e. there’s no need to pre-freeze the bowl or mixture. So this ice cream maker offers a quick and seamless process.

The machine is moderately noisy (maximum of 64 decibels, according to my meter), but the entire process takes at least 45 minutes, so it’s quite a long time to listen to the motor (don’t plan to use this when guests are over). It is also energy efficient, consuming just 0.8 kWh on average, although the Cuisinart ICE-100 was slightly better at 0.7 kWh.

I made three recipes: David Lebovitz’s classic vanilla custard ice cream, Barbara Tropp’s lemon sorbet, and a vanilla gelato from Saveur magazine. The vanilla custard ice cream came out fluffy and creamy, but it didn’t stay cold for long enough. Even after 50 minutes of whirring, I still felt like I needed to put it in the freezer to harden it up a bit.

The sorbet came out beautifully, balanced and sweetly tart, and the texture was visually coarse, but creamy upon tasting. The gelato was a bit lighter than the custard (because I didn’t use egg yolks), but it was otherwise indistinguishable in flavor from the custard recipe.

Breville Smart Scoop Ice Cream Maker review: Verdict

The Breville Smart Scoop is highly customizable, with 12 hardness settings for different styles of recipes, and its control knob is both intuitive and easy to work with. The downsides of this machine are its heavy weight (32 pounds) and its price ($499.95), especially when you consider that you may need to put the final product in the freezer to firm it up. It takes approximately 50 minutes to freeze ice cream with this machine, and with each batch, I still needed to put my desserts in the freezer for the finishing touches. 

The Whynter ICM-200LS Ice Cream Maker scored more highly and comes in at half the price. That’s why it’s our best compressor ice cream maker. The ice cream was ready to eat straight from the bowl and didn’t need more freezer time, so this is likely a better purchase.

However, if customization and extra features means more to you than anything, it’s worth sticking with the Breville Smart Scoop.