Baste, Serve, Spread, Scoop—What Can’t A Sauce Spoon Do?

Never in my thirty years of existence did I think I’d be writing a love letter to a spoon but, well, here we are! While this utensil might seem like an understudy in the stage that is the kitchen, this is no mere eat-your-breakfast-cereal or scoop-some-yogurt, spoon. No, my friends, this is an ode to the sauce spoon. “So, what?” you may ask. Well, sauce spoons have extensive kitchen credentials; they’re frequently wielded by chefs and cooks to create a perfect swoosh of puree or to drizzle a dark, rich jus over a meltingly tender short rib. 

And while chefs love them for, well, saucing, we at Serious Eats also love them—for a myriad of other reasons. So, in keeping with the theater analogy…how do I love thee (sauce spoon)? Let me count the ways. 

What Exactly Is a Sauce Spoon?

Sauce spoons have larger bowls and longer handles than a standard soup spoon (while they vary, many spoons hover around nine inches long). 

“Most home kitchens have regular teaspoons or soup spoons, and then they have those enormous serving spoons with the foot-long handles,” says Daniel Gritzer, Serious Eats senior culinary director. “The sauce spoon fills a critical gap, one restaurant cooks have long known is an important one, combining a serving spoon-size bowl (or a tad smaller, but still big enough to be much more useful during cooking) with a shorter handle that is much less unwieldy.” 

Sauce spoons also sport a slightly offset handle, which makes it easy to scoop and spoon things in a more refined manner than, say, plopping stuff in a bowl with a ladle. While my preferred spoons are *technically* called serving spoons, they’re basically sauce spoons in disguise: they’re 8.5 inches long and feature a nice, wide bowl, perfect for scooping, swooping, and swirling. I even used them to plate and serve food at my backyard wedding, so they got some real-world (if slightly tipsy) testing.

What’s a Sauce Spoon Good For? 

While often used by chefs and cooks to spread sauce on plates before tweezering assorted fancy foods on top (or to spoon sauce over things), the sauce spoon goes waaaaaay beyond its namesake purpose. Yes, it can be used to sauce things, but it’s also great at giving hummus a beautiful swoop, scooping gobs of whipped cream onto fruit, and, in my case, serving up food to some 40-plus guests. 

Serious Eats updates editor Jacob Dean also notes that sauce spoons are “perfect for basting a steak in a pan,” and that their long enough handle allows you to “stir the interior of a saucepan without having to really stick your whole hand in there and get splattered.” And, come holiday season, you can ditch the gravy ladle and grab a sauce spoon to make your mountain of mashed taters into a volcano, or to spoon pan sauce over your slice of turkey. 

What’s the Best Sauce Spoon? 

Many of our editors are partial to what could be called the sauciest of sauce spoons: the JB Prince Sauce Spoon. Created by the late chef Grey Kunz in the 90s, this iteration set the standard for what a good sauce spoon should be: it should have a nimble, longer handle (but not too long), and a capacious bowl. The JB Prince model also sports a slight offset where the bowl meets the handle, which allows you to get all Jackson Pollock with food (a drizzle or dollop of this, a decorative smear of that). I also love these $2-a-pop spoons I used for my wedding, which, while called serving spoons, are quite similar in shape and size to sauce spoons. And my new favorite sauce spoon, which was a splurge at $11, is this grippy option from Mercer: it’s nicely balanced and has ridges where your fingers rest so there’s no risk of it slipping out of your hand and into a pot of grits or what have you. 

FAQs

What is a sauce spoon?

A sauce spoon is basically an enlarged soup spoon with an offset. Some examples included this famous one from JB Prince and this one from Mercer. 

What can I do with a sauce spoon?

More than just sauce things, that’s for sure! Sauce spoons are great for serving, basting, gently placing eggs in boiling water, creating that beautiful hummus swoop, scooping, dolloping, and yes—saucing or drizzling.