I Tested 8 Sphere Ice Molds and Found 3 I Recommend

“At the end of the day, it’s all about the ice in the cocktail,” says Josué Castillo, beverage director for Boston, MA’s Pazza on Porter and Next Door. Indeed, there might be no greater pleasure than seeing a boozy drink, like an Old Fashioned, being poured over a big sphere of ice. The showmanship of the ice ball, its rock-hard chill, the way it rolls around in the glass as you sip...It's a beautiful thing. Or, as Sire Negri, bar coordinator at Havana Beach Bar and Grill, notes: in “spirit-heavy drinks,” a single, big ice sphere offers a “better presentation and drink experience.” 

Key to that experience is the sphere’s slow rate of melt. “Standard ice cubes start to melt right away. The cocktail might not be that great because, by the time it gets to the table, it’s watered down,” Castillo says. Spheres don't dilute drinks as quickly as other types of ice. This is especially true for clear ice spheres, which don't have fast-melting air pockets. Though no ice mold is perfect, I tested eight popular sphere ice molds to find options that freeze effectively, form an aesthetically pleasing sphere, don’t retain off-flavors, and are easy to use. My testing revealed three sphere molds that were better than all the others at making ice that was beautiful and clean-tasting.

The Winners, at a Glance

The Best Sphere Ice Mold

TINANA Crystal Clear Ice Ball Maker

$50

$40 at Amazon

$63

$33 at Walmart

An insulated box with thick silicone sphere molds, this product uses a method called directional freezing to yield crystal-clear balls, which are buried so deeply within the mold and so untouched by air bubbles that they avoid freezer smells that might mar their flavor.

The Best Budget-Friendly Sphere Ice Mold

Glacio Clear Ice Sphere Duo

$13 at Amazon View on Walmart

This mold performed pretty well; I filled it to the brim with water (ignoring the instructions), and it resulted in a nicely rounded ice ball. While it was a little tricky to remove from the mold, a quick run under hot water did the trick.

Editor's Pick

WIBIMEN Round Ice Cube Tray with Lid & Bin

$23

$15 at Amazon

Serious Eats associate editorial director Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm says this tray brings her "infinite joy." If you prefer small ice spheres, you'll likely agree. It's better for cocktails than spirits on the rocks, and it includes a storage tray so you can make a lot of ice.

The Tests

• Filling Test: I filled the molds per the manufacturer's instructions, evaluating how easy they were to fill and assemble, and noting the clarity and accuracy of the instructions. I then transferred the molds to the freezer, noting if the molds leaked and how much freezer space each took up. 

• Ice Test: I froze the molds and then unmolded the ice. I observed ease of extraction and hardness, shape, and cosmetic uniformity of the ice.

• Drink Test: I placed an ice sphere from each model into a rocks glass and poured an Old Fashioned over it, observing and sipping to test fit, looks, chill, and taste.

• Dilution Test: I left the ice in the Old Fashioned for 10 minutes, then observed the rate of melting and the sphere’s appearance. I also tasted each cocktail to analyze dilution. 

• Storage and Off-Taste Test: I made new ice in each model and left the molds in the freezer for one week. After that, I unmolded the ice and placed each sphere into an Old Fashioned, sampling it to test for any off-flavors and aromas.

• Cleanup Tests: I washed the spheres by hand twice, evaluating how easy they were to clean. 
  

What We Learned

Trial and Error Were the Keys to Filling Sphere Ice Molds

How do you properly fill a sphere ice mold? If you think you’d find the answer in the manufacturer's instructions, guess again. I found these generally unreliable. Success, while varied, came best through multiple instances of trial and error. 

I tried four types of sphere molds. First, there were the round silicone molds in two parts that got pushed together to form a sphere that you fill with water through a small hole at the top. The instructions for these molds tell you to fill them to 80 or 90%. But, given that their holes are quite small and the molds aren’t see-through, hitting those percentages was anyone’s guess. Incompletely filling them led to incomplete ice spheres. I found it was best to just fill them all the way to the top. 

Second, there were plastic and silicone molds, with a standing base and a cap that was pressed into the base. Instructions varied for these. The Tovolo instructed me to fill to the fill line and then press the cap on, but that also resulted in an incomplete sphere. Again, the experience taught me that it was best to fill the base all the way to the top and then push the cap on. That gave me the best spheres.

The third type of mold was a silicone or plastic tray that made multiple spheres. The specific fill instructions worked well enough for each of these, but the ice removal instructions did not. As with the other types of molds, I was instructed to twist the molds in all directions to force the spheres out. But the halves of the molds stuck together, and the spheres clung to the bottoms. The mini-sphere trays even came with conflicting instructions. The booklet said twist. The box instructed to push. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but no amount of pushing worked on the rigid plastic form, anyway. Instead, I found running warm water over the mold or just letting it sit until the mold and sphere warmed up enough to ease the ice out worked best.

Finally, there was the TINANA insulated box mold. I could not, no matter how hard I tried, find the fill line the instructions insisted was there. So, I just winged it and filled the box to the top. An even bigger issue was the instructions for removal. They simply said to pull up on the handles on both sides. But this unit’s thick silicone parts fit so snugly in the plastic container that these instructions proved futile. I finally figured out a hack for removal that involved all four limbs and a lot of leverage. It was awkward, but it worked. 

The lesson here is: Read the instructions, but prepare to deviate from them. Make these molds your own. Experiment for the best results in filling and removal.

Silicone Vs. Plastic Sphere Ice Molds: Which Was Better?

Pliable silicone and rigid plastic are the two standard materials for freezer-bound sphere ice molds. But these materials vary in performance depending on the form of the mold. The worst-performing molds I tested were tray molds made of soft silicone material. These floppy items leaked water at the seams between their top and bottom halves, and they had to be delicately placed in the freezer. If anything was placed on top of them, they would cave in, leaking water out of the top of the mold. Leakage within the freezer led to ice slicks and messiness. The thin silicone also tended to pick up freezer smells easily. 

Rigid plastic trays, on the other hand, have multiple advantages. Once you fill them and squeeze them together, they’re more secure than the soft trays, so there isn’t as much of a possibility that they will leak in the freezer. They're stackable, too, meaning you can place something on top of them, and they won’t cave in. They were also more impervious to freezer smells.

Single-sphere molds, on the other hand, do better when they’re made completely out of silicone rather than both silicone and plastic. The biggest reason for this is that these molds tend to get jostled in the freezer, even falling out of the full freezer onto the floor at times. When that happens, the rigid plastic parts of the mold tend to chip and break, which makes standing them up in your freezer or trying to stack them difficult. Overall, the Zoku and Tovolo models just don’t hold up over time and after usage. If you left them long enough, the silicone-and-plastic molds also tended to yield spheres that weren’t so much round as bulbous and oblong.

The round molds made entirely out of heavy silicone—in my tests, the Glacio Round Ice Cube Mold and the Chillz Extreme Ice Ball Mold, which are essentially identical—are fun to use and look like big rubber balls. You can fit a bunch in the freezer, and they’ll be durable. I've already addressed the problems with removing the spheres from them, and they tend to yield spheres with dimples where the holes are on the top of the mold and an extra ring of ice where the seam is. But, as I said previously, those imperfections can be masked in a darker drink. They will, however, pick up freezer smells.

As for clean up, every one of them was just fine hand-washed and in the dishwasher. However, when it comes to the TINANA mold (which uses both silicone and rigid plastic to great effect), you’re best served removing the plastic box from the Styrofoam insulation before you throw it in the dishwasher, and even if you hand-wash it, as that Styrofoam will degrade over time.

Two-and-a-Half Inches Was the Best Size for Sphere Ice Molds

The Old Fashioned is the ultimate rocks glass drink. In fact, a synonym for the rocks glass is the Old Fashioned glass. A wide, squat receptacle, this glass looks best with one big sphere rolling around in it. The spheres with the best dimensions were 2.5 inches across. At this size, the sphere nearly filled the glass, clanking attractively against its sides as I sipped, and keeping my cocktail frosty and potent. I liked the way the sphere rose out of the drink like an iceberg, melting more slowly than square ice cubes would have. The bigger spheres held up after 10 minutes in a drink, especially if they came from the base-and-cap molds, which had the advantage of not creating a seam through the middle of the ice sphere, a weak spot in the results from the round molds, where the sphere tended to melt more quickly. 

I tested three molds with smaller-sized spheres. The TINANA spheres measure out to be 2.36 inches; this was not enough of a difference to matter, so they’re effectively as good (and, in so many ways, better) than other spheres of a full 2.5 inches. The spheres for the Houdini Large Sphere Ice Tray Mold were only 1.75 inches in diameter, which proved awkward in a rocks glass. One sphere was not enough to keep the drink cold or to look attractive in the glass. When I added a second sphere, it sat uneasily on top of the first, almost completely above the surface of the drink, and it hit me in the face when I sipped. 

One mold made 33 marble-like spheres of one inch in diameter each. They’re effectively mega-pebble ice, and they are not appropriate for a rocks glass unless you use about 10 of them at once. These spheres are much better suited to a highball glass, where they look delightfully like giant boba (the tapioca balls in bubble tea), and they melt less quickly than crushed ice does.

The Best Sphere Ice Molds Make Clear Ice

No sphere ice came out pristine. There were dimples and dents, cracks, and seams. Some were more oblong or bulbous than spherical. Cloudy spheres emerged from every mold, except one: the TINANA. The clear spheres that the TINANA mold made were superior in many ways. In the glass, they looked fantastic, light bouncing off them reflectively, the drink showing clear through to the other side. The mold insulates so well that freezer smells don’t affect the ice, and clear ice tends to taste better anyway because it's free of air bubbles and pockets that help give cloudy ice freezer flavors. 

When you’re making cocktails for friends, why not wow them with the great party trick of clear ice? Many craft cocktail bars make clear ice by freezing water in a cooler that's filled to the top. The ice freezes from the top downward. Due to the insulation of the cooler, the bottom portion of the ice block freezes last, and the air bubbles get pushed downward into that portion, so only the bottom portion ends up cloudy. That’s if you freeze the entirety until rock solid. If you don’t freeze it all the way, then the bottom portion will remain unfrozen, and you can just turn the cooler over and pour that portion of water off. You’re left with a solid, clear block of ice. That’s called directional freezing.

The TINANA works exactly this way, except it inserts spherical molds into the top part of the “cooler,” so that the clear ice freezes in sphere form. The cloudy ice is left in a solid block at the bottom of the insulated box. You must either melt that with hot water or leave it to melt on its own at room temperature.

The Criteria: What to Look for in a Sphere Ice Mold

“Always clear!” is Negri’s ice sphere mantra. So when it comes to ice molds, he says, “anyone that uses [the] directional freezing method would be good.” My tests found that he was right. The directional freezing method of the TINANA rendered big, crystal-clear orbs of ice with superior looks and flavor.

Our Favorite Sphere Ice Molds

The Best Sphere Ice Mold

TINANA Crystal Clear Ice Ball Maker

$50

$40 at Amazon

$63

$33 at Walmart

What we liked: The clever, insulation-meets-ice mold technology of the TINANA uses directional freezing to achieve four spheres that are so clear that you can see your cocktail straight through each of them. Since clear ice is devoid of the air bubbles of cloudy ice, it captures less of the freezer smells that might be lingering, and it tastes better. Plus, it looks great. It also melts uniformly, keeping its shape and clarity as it wanes. It’s a cut above any other ice I achieved in the other molds. As per the manufacturer's instructions, it takes a full 24 hours to make ice with this mold, but the wait is worth it.

What we didn’t like: At nearly 24 square inches, this mold hogs freezer space. It’s also cumbersome to remove the frozen spheres, and I couldn't do it per the instructions. Instead, I had to wedge it between my knees upside down and yank on both sides of the silicone molds until it slid out. If the plastic box came out of the Styrofoam insulation along with the molds, I had to wedge the cold outer box between my knees and yank on the molds some more before they dislodged. However, when you can remove the ice, make sure to do it over something that can take spills, in case the bottom half isn’t fully frozen yet. I also recommend letting this mold rest for a bit at room temperature or running it under warm water, which will make ice removal easier.

Key Specs

• Materials: Silicone, plastic, styrofoam

• Size: 8.46 x 7.48 x 7.3 inches

• Number of molds: 4

• Capacity: 2.36-inch diameter spheres

• Weight: 0.6 ounces

• Cleanup: Dishwasher-safe (not the styrofoam insulation, though)
  

The Best Budget-Friendly Sphere Ice Mold

Glacio Clear Ice Sphere Duo

$13 at Amazon View on Walmart

What we liked: This durable set was easy to use and, since it's made of silicone, was easy to fit into a packed freezer. The results were great, too: the molds produced shiny, round ice globes that fit into most glasses.

What we didn't like: The instructions tell you not to fill the molds fully, which, rather intuitively, results in less spherical final results. The molds were also tricky to open (an easy workaround is to just run them under hot water for a little bit), and they did pick up freezer smells after a while.

Key Specs

• Materials: Silicone

• Size: 2.8 x 2.8 x 2.7 inches each

• Number of molds: 2 (comes in a set of 4 as well)

• Capacity: 2.5-inch diameter spheres

• Weight: 4.7 ounces each

• Cleanup: Dishwasher-safe

Editor's Pick Best Sphere Ice Mold

WIBIMEN Round Ice Cube Tray with Lid & Bin

$23

$15 at Amazon

What we liked: This tray can hold a lot of ice, so you can prepare a bunch before a get-together. The size and shape is a good substitute for crushed ice. It's durable and long-lasting—Riddley has owned and used hers regularly for over two years, and says it still works great.

What we didn't like: These spheres are small, so while they look cool, they will dilute a drink faster. Like all sphere ice molds, this one creates not-quite-perfect spheres (but it's harder to nitpick with so many in a glass). It's almost impossible to fill and close without getting squirted.

Key Specs

• Materials: Plastic

• Size:  7.4 x 4.49 x 2.95 inches

• Number of molds: 66

• Capacity: 0.80-inch diameter spheres

• Weight: 1.23 pounds with storage

• Cleanup: Hand-wash only

The Competition

• Zoku Set of 2 Silicone Sphere Ice Molds, Stackable: The term “stackable” here is stretched. In truth, they didn't stack easily, and I had trouble making full, round spheres with this mold, though the spheres did release more easily from it. 

• Houdini Large Sphere Ice Tray Mold: This was the worst of all the molds. Its flimsy silicone material made it too floppy to handle, and it leaked all over the place. The spheres, if they come out well, which wasn't a guarantee, were an awkward 1.75 inches in diameter—too small to use just one in a rocks glass, too large to use two.

• Glacio Large Ice Sphere Mold Tray: This mold tends to leak at the seams, and the seal between halves is just not tight enough, so you get spheres that look like Saturn. It also tends to pick up freezer odors.

• Tovolo Sphere Ice Molds: This is another one that sits in the freezer awkwardly and that has rigid plastic parts that can break. Also, the manufacturer will lead you astray with instructions that result in half a sphere. It tends to yield lumpy spheres.

• Round Ice Cube Tray with Lid, with Container Mini Circle Ice: This is a fun little kit with two trays making 66 ice marbles (I wouldn’t call them spheres, even though they’re round) that you can drop into the plastic box and scoop out with the plastic scoop that comes with the trays. However, this is not a mold for making spheres for Old Fashioneds or anything you’d put in a rocks glass. Use it for highballs.

• Chillz Extreme Ice Ball Molds 2 Ball Capacity: See my comments for the Glacio Round Ice Cube Molds because this was exactly the same product, just branded differently. It's also been out of stock for a while.
  

FAQs

Do you use ice spheres in the same way you would use cubes?

Ice cubes are the all-purpose workhorses of the bar. You use them in shakers and mixing glasses, and you can use them in any size or shape glass. But the standard ice cube is nowhere as marvelous as an ice sphere. A sphere is a specialized kind of ice. It’s presentation ice, not working ice. You drop it into a rocks glass and pour a shaken or stirred—or even dispensed out of a cocktail machine—drink over the top of it. It melts more slowly than ice cubes do, and it looks fantastic and sounds fantastic in the glass. Extra-large, clear cubes can be fun, especially if you have an ice press that you can use to brand them. But they don’t roll around in the glass like a sphere does.

Do ice balls freeze in the same way/same amount of time as cubes? 

Freezing time all depends on the size of the ice and the amount of insulation in the mold. If you’re working with a standard ice tray for cubes, you’ll get a faster freeze than any spherical mold because the cube tray is open at the top and made out of metal or thin plastic. Spherical molds are closed, so there’s more insulating material all around the ice, and thus the ice freezes more slowly. However, if you’re freezing tiny spheres and huge cubes, the tiny spheres might freeze faster simply because they’re so small.

What’s the key to clear ice? 

The key to clear ice is insulation on all sides of the mold—except one. This leads to a type of freezing called directional freezing. The parts of the ice that are most insulated freeze last, and the last part to freeze is the part that ends up with cloudy air bubbles in it. The rest of the ice will be crystal clear. That’s the idea behind the TINANA. The extra insulation on the sides and bottom allows for directional freezing. The sphere molds sit at the top of the box, where they freeze first and, thus, clearly. The water at the bottom of the box catches all the air bubbles, and it freezes into a cloudy block.

Are spherical ice molds better?

There's no hard and fast answer to this, but if you want to wow friends and family with a round block of ice in their cocktail, then a spherical ice mold is the tool to do it. Round ice also melts more slowly than cube-shaped ice, so that's worth something if you want to nurse a glass of good whiskey slowly. I found most molds were so-so at producing perfectly clear, smooth orbs of ice, but our winner from TINANA came the closest.

What other ice shapes can I make?

There is a huge variety of ice molds out there, including your standard cube-shaped ice molds, large cube molds, mini cube molds, heart-shaped molds, and even rose-shaped ice molds. While many of these molds are fun, keep in mind that the more complicated the shape, the harder it will be to remove the ice.

Why We're the Experts

• Betsy Andrews is a contributor to Serious Eats and James Beard- and IACP-nominated food and drink journalist. Her work has also appeared in Eater, The New York Times, and Food & Wine. She's also reviewed coupe glasses and cocktail muddlers for Serious Eats.

• For this review, she made over 15 pounds of ice across eight different molds and tested that ice for clarity, flavor, and melting speed across six different tests.

• She also interviewed Josué Castillo (beverage director for Boston, MA’s Pazza on Porter and Next Door) and Sire Negri (bar coordinator at Havana Beach Bar and Grill).