The reality is, any professional bartender is going to have a bar spoon to hand at any moment, and that’s because they do so many different little jobs. Let’s break down those different jobs and see what the options are.
Bar Spoons
The reality here is that you can have a spoon to hand that is calibrated and designed specifically to give you an accurate measurement. However, when you’re adding such small amounts of ingredients, what really matters is knowing your spoon. As long as you know what measurement you get from it, you can still be very accurate.
So, either use a measured teaspoon, or buy a bar spoon you like the look &feel of and learn what measurement it gives you.
A key tool for stirring cocktails like Martinis and Manhattans, or simply mixing ingredients together that need a little agitation to get them to combine. The reality here is that you do need something long enough to get down into a glass, and be able to spin ice and booze around in a glass when stirring.
With all this in mind, your kitchen teaspoon is just not going to work.
Nonetheless , you do have the option of using a chopstick. It’s brilliant for stirring cocktails and combining ingredients together, although it can be a little too thin to effectively combine thicker ingredients.
Is a chopstick going to do everything you need and also satisfy your equipment desires? No. However, we highly recommend having a chopstick in your tool kit. It’s great for stirring as mentioned, but also really good for shaping twists when you want to curl and twist them into appealing shapes.
Some bar spoons have a flat round end that can be used to crush ingredients.
It’s good for soft fruits like raspberries, or fresh herbs. However, it’s utterly useless up against anything more robust than a medium strawberry. So, handy as it can be, you need to have a proper tool for muddling in your toolkit making the bar spoon with a muddler end a little unnecessary.
There is a different trick that this end of the spoon does better than muddling, and that’s layering. Not exactly a common technique, but when you want to layer something on top, the round muddler end of a bar spoon is even better than the back of a spoon. The spiralled shaft of the spoon gives liquids something to grab on to as you trickle them down the length of the spoon. The liquid then hits the flat end of the spoon and dissipates outwards in all directions off the spoon – perfect conditions for getting one ingredient to sit on top of another.