After scoring big time at the Salvation Army with a LL Bean Ice Cream Ball and pleased that I never paid full price for this item ( not worth it. It is fun, but the end result is not a great amount of ice cream and somewhere between a soft serve and ice cream that sat on the counter too long.)
I may be in the market for some other kind of ice cream making gizmo.
Hand crank or electric, I don’t care. Just information please.
Recipe’s too.
Don’t all ice cream makers end up with ice cream like this? I’m hardly an expert, but every one I’ve used doesn’t freeze it to store-bought ice-cream hardness. You have to put it in the freezer for several hours or overnight if you want something other than soft-serve.
You are correct.
Speaking very generally (and as a layperson), the purpose of an ice cream maker is to reduce the temperature of all the ingredients down to freezing while keeping them in movement. This results in crystallization at a smaller size - obviously you could just throw all the ingredients into a bowl and freeze it, but it wouldn’t be scoopable. Ice cream makers freeze the outside of a container, and paddles scrape the frozen material off the walls to replace it with unfrozen material. Eventually everything is crystallized, but you still need to put it into the freezer to “harden” it to what we know as ice cream.
There are basically three types of ice cream makers as described in my post here.
That is correct as far as I know. Actually, I think this is true of commercial ice cream makers as well, based on what I see on “Unwrapped.”
I have one of those Cuisinart dealios, with the bowl that you freeze first. Freezing the bowl is a bit of a pain, but it couldn’t be easier to use/clean/operate correctly. You get about a pint and a half per batch, which is perfect for me because any more could get dangerous. I also have the Ben & Jerry’s recipe book!
My recommendation is to get one of the four quart electric machines that you see at WalMart or Target for around 15-20 dollars. They work well and make good ice cream. The downsides are you need a bunch of ice for them and they make a lot of ice cream (a word of advice - don’t quadruple a quart recipe for a four quart machine - you have to leave room for expansion - triple a quart recipe).
Keep in mind that commercially made ice cream has a lot more air in it than homemade ice cream does. When homemade ice cream freezes up completely, it gets much harder than commercial ice cream does.
On the other hand, if you intend to share homemade ice cream with friends and family, a pint and a half may give everyone 3 bites and be unsatisfactory.
One can, if one is determined, make two batches back to back, but the second one may not freeze completely.
Such has been reported to me from my brother, who got three ice cream freezers as wedding presents and kept the most expensive (the Cuisinart).
When the Cuisinart bowl got damaged somehow, it was replaced by a $20 Wal-mart electric version to which you add the ice.
Only one I’ve ever used is a hand cranked White Mountain 6 quart churn. Way too enormous for my private use, requires a freaking glacier’s worth of ice (difficult to buy enough pounds of ice at your local NYC deli), but makes very nice ice cream very reliably.
They are out of business. A company named Rival makes some that my folks have bought and use, mostly electrics, they complain of cheap parts (styrofoam instead of wood; low quality welded joints for the churn itself; etc), but again the ice cream itself comes out nice.
In general, you want one with genuine paddles that do indeed rotate. I have a preference for hand cranked because you can feel the texture through the handle. An electric is just going to sit there going ya-aaaang ya-aaaang ya-aaaang until it hits enough resistance to konk out, something that you can’t adjust and which may change with time as the motor ages etc.
Officially, it serves six (actual volume depends a lot on add-ins, I’ve gotten as much as a quart+). As mentioned above, homemade ice cream contains less air than even super-premium commercial ice cream and is extrmely rich, so IMHO it is perfectly satisfying in the 1/2 cup portion. (In fact, after you get used to it “regular premium” tastes like a mouthful of air). Of course, if quantity is a major concern then clearly the small cuisinart machine is not the right choice for you.
If serving more than 6 people is a rare but expected event, you can buy two bowls and make consecutive batches. Actually a lot of people buy two bowls.
Myself, I don’t like to deal with the mess and bother of salt/ice machines (I live in a small apartment without an icemaker). It takes all sorts, of course, that’s why there are so many different products on the market!
Either I’m wrong about that being the exact model formerly owned by my brother and his wife --always possible-- or my brother is a piggie–also possible. My understanding was that one batch made enough for two people, with a little left over. They only once made ice cream using it when I was around, and we were certainly a group of more than six, some of whom would have found a mere half cup portion more unsatisfactory than others.
I have one of the Cuisinart ones. It’s worked well, except you have to plan ahead for chilling the bowl (I usually just store the bowl in the freezer so it’s ready to go). If you want to make two batches, you have to wait 10-12 hours so the bowl refreezes, or get a spare bowl and keep THAT in the freezer too.
The Cuisinart is actually one of the few appliances I considered worth bringing to Thailand with us (even with the hassle of the power supply differences). That said, I’ve noticed recently it’s been shutting off early-- as little as 5 minutes into the freezing process. It may have been damaged in transit, or it’s just wearing out, or it’s simply too hot in our (unairconditioned) kitchen.
To replace it, in the interests of avoiding uni-purpose kitchen implements (go Alton Brown!), I picked up an interesting KitchenAid ice-cream maker attachment to use with our bowl-lift KitchenAid mixer. It’s got a freezer bowl like the Cuisinart, but the bowl simply clips onto where the mixer bowl normally would go, and the dasher fits over the mixer arm (so unlike the Cuisinart one, the bowl stays stationary, and the dasher turns). It’s a bit bigger than the Cuisinart, too. I haven’t had a chance to use it (it only arrived today) but I’ll try it out and report back as soon as I can…
I use a Donvier ice cream maker. It’s similar to the Cuisinart in that it uses a chilled bowl instead of ice, but it is entirely manual. No electricity required. (You don’t need to turn it continuously; just one turn every minute or so.)
The only downside is that it only makes one quart and you have to leave the bowl in the freezer overnight beforehand so it isn’t much good for sudden urges to make ice cream.
I have the ice cream maker attachment set for my KitchenAid mixer, and I LOVE it. I keep the bowl in the freezer and I can make ice cream anytime!
Also, you should get David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop” cookbook – it is de-LISH. So far, I’ve made the cinnamon ice cream (my favorite so far), gianduja gelato, and blueberry frozen yogurt. YUM.
You! I remember watching one of those crafty kiddy shows where they showed you how to make ice cream using cream, ice, salt and flavouring (im sure theres some other needed items im not remembering!) The only flavouring I had in the cupboard at the time was peppermint - it made a fine ice cream! Its much cheaper and more fun to make it yourself!
I have a Cuisinart (freeze-the-bowl type) and get very good results. It’s soft when fresh but freezes hard in the freezer. I used to have a Donvier; it worked fine but it was too small and the Cuisinart is larger and has a motor.
I only have a couple of recipes though and would love more.
I’ve been using this one for over 10 years now and I swear by it.
No ice, no salt, no mess. Great product.
Ditto on the Donvier here. We’re both very hands-on people when it comes to cooking, so we liked the idea of being involved in the process by hand-cranking, rather than letting a motor do the work for us.
Re: the downsides mentioned by others:
Freezing the cylinder in advance wasn’t a concern for us, since we have a chest freezer in the basement and just store the cylinder in there when it’s not in use. Much easier than lugging home giant bags of ice for the old-fashioned models! I could see the cylinder being an issue for someone with a teensy apartment-sized fridge, though… so definitely something to consider when making your selection.
Also, I really haven’t had any issues with the amount of ice cream it produces. We get roughly 1 quart of ice cream per batch - that’s been enough to serve dessert for six and still have some left over. As it is, we’re wishing we’d gotten something smaller because 1 quart of ice cream is a little too much temptation when it’s just the two of us. 
Also, I second the motion on The Perfect Scoop. It’s our bible for all things ice cream.
Mahna, I self-sacrificingly volunteer to eat all your extra ice cream. To save you from temptation. 
Liquid Nitrogen. Obtain from an industrial gas place or (in my case) my dad who has access to it through work.
Using LN to make ice cream has a number of advantages over any machine:
The ice cream comes out great - tiny little crystals so it’s very smooth, and the LN boiling off entrains plenty of air into the mix, jillions of tiny bubbles.
I have photos if anyone wants to see my first trial.
You need to either youtube it or do the pictures and post it on instructables!
I don’t have any video but here’s some photos from my first attempt, I did this for my uncle & aunt and their kids.
Ingredients were very simple - I used two quarts of half & half, a cup of sugar and some vanilla. Stir it all up.
Put on eye and hand protection. Make sure base is in a metal container (glass is a no-no). Add LN and stir (use wood utensils or metal & gloves). Continue adding LN and stirring (you’ll need to blow the fog away to check progress) until done. From the time stamps on my photos, from the start of pouring until the ice cream was done took four minutes. I added a bunch of chocolate chips at the end.
Results were incredibly smooth and creamy, very rich.