1. Field
The invention is in the field of scoops for materials such as food, for example ice cream, mashed potatoes, ground meat, and cookie dough.
2. State of the Art
Various types of scoops are known for scooping various materials, particularly food products such as ice cream, mashed potatoes, ground meat, and cookie dough. Most such scoops have a hemispherical or similarly shaped bowl attached to an elongate handle. A user holds the handle in his or her fist with a portion of the handle and the bowl extending therefrom and manipulates the handle and bowl in the material to be scooped to fill the bowl with the material. The manipulation is done mainly with the wrist. If the material being scooped is relatively hard, such as hard ice cream, it can be very difficult to manipulate the bowl in the material to fill the bowl and remove it from the material. If multiple scoops of material are desired, obtaining such multiple scoops can be very hard on the user's wrist. Various release mechanisms have been designed for use in such scoops to help release from the bowl a scoop of material that sticks to the bowl. However, this does not help in filling the bowl with the material. The various release aids included in such scoops indicates that releasing a scoop once obtained can be difficult.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,699,914 shows an apparatus for making meatballs which, similarly to the scoop devices described above, includes a hemispherical bowl or cup on the end of a handle so that the handle is held in a user's fist and is manipulated to manipulate the bowl or cup in the mass of meat material from which the meatballs are formed. The cup includes two hemispherical cups, one within the other, so that when inserted into the mass of meat, one cup is rotated with respect to the other to form a closed sphere with the meat material formed into a ball therein. A release mechanism is provided release the ball when the cups are opened.
Some scoop devices, such as a butter ball maker shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,003,197 or a snowball maker shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,080,572, include hemispherical bowls or molds on ends of handles arranged in scissor like devices which are inserted into and closed in the material to be formed into balls. These are also difficult to use and releasing the balls from the bowls can be difficult.
There remains a need for a scoop device that is easy to use, particularly to be inserted into relatively hard materials such as hard ice cream, and that reduces the use of the wrist in use of the scoop. It is also desirable to have a scoop device which easily releases the scoop of material from the device once it is scooped into the device.