Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker
When the mixture is so thick that the machine turns off, the ice cream is ready to go into the freezer to finish firming up. All you need to do is stay nearby so you can see that it’s done or listen for the churning to stop, since it’s a little louder than the more expensive compressor-style ice cream makers. While most of our ice cream maker picks can dish up a decent soft-serve, this machine excels cuisinart pots and pans set at it. Plus, it has a few bells and whistles that make hosting an ice cream social even more enjoyable. The soft-serve maker is fully automatic and can make 1 ½ quarts of ice cream, or about 10 to 12 servings at a time. The Whynter ice cream machine was the top pick for Wirecutter and performed well in our tests, producing smooth ice cream with texture comparable to that of our top picks.
And this means the ice cream it churns out is every bit as good as the bigger, more expensive models. As this is the cheapest of the s, you might expect the ice cream from the ICE-21 to be poorer than from it’s more expensive brothers. How long it takes to will depend on your recipe, how much mixture there is, how cold it is, how cold your bowl is and even how cold the room is!
Yes, it does come with a steep price tag, but it also has quite a few benefits. The 1 ½ quart ice cream maker contains a compressor, just like a window air conditioner, that freezes the ice cream while it churns. That means you don’t have to worry about freezing and refreezing a bowl between batches. Cuisinart is a trusted brand when it comes to ice cream makers and they have a model to meet every budget. The ICE-21 model may not have all the bells and whistles of some of the brand’s higher-end models, but it’s fully automatic and promises to deliver quality homemade ice cream in 20 minutes. There are settings for ice cream, gelato, or sorbet, which control the speed of the mixing paddle.
The instructions say it takes about 10 minutes of mixing to get soft-serve ice cream. For a harder consistency, they recommend freezing the ice cream for another minutes. Just like old-fashioned ice cream makers, this model uses ice to freeze the ice cream but churning is hands-free thanks to an electric motor. An affordable and fully automatic model produces up to 1 1/2 quarts of ice cream or frozen yogurt in 20 minutes or less.
There are a lot of painful, labor-intensive ways to make homemade ice cream, and I think I’ve tried them all. Through my research I found that a good ice-cream maker is kind of like a good neck cream—it’s hard to find and mostly left up to preference. But one machine with just one review (a five-star, at that) caught my eye and just felt right. Trust me, I was even more startled than you at the superficial reasoning behind this impulse purchase.
On the other hand, the beauty of making your own is using ingredients you prefer. If you’ve trained your taste buds to like skim milk, you might not miss the extra boost whole milk gives. This one’s vanilla, served over warm peach berry crisp. Freeze slurry 20 minutes in ice cream maker, as directed in the how-to section earlier on this page, slowly adding candy, and nuts if using, in last 5 minutes.
Some manual models are even more simple to use, only requiring you to stir the ingredients in a freezer bowl. The one inconsistency our product tester experienced while using this attachment is when freezing different flavors of ice cream. Her plain vanilla batch never progressed to fully frozen so it had to be put in the freezer at that point; two other flavors ended up with a creamy, whipped soft-serve texture. Regardless, all batches were evenly mixed and ended up delicious.