“This easily works with my KitchenAid and the recipes that come with it are some of the best ice creams I’ve made.” For those serious about making high-quality ice cream, the Breville Smart Scoop is a gold standard of machines. Tyler Malek, cuisinart griddler elite co-owner and ice cream mastermind at Portland, Oregon-based Salt & Straw, uses his Breville three to four times a week in the R&D kitchen. Built-in refrigeration means you can churn at the push of a button with no wait time between batches.
This means more frozen mixture is taken from the sides of the bowl into the middle faster. However, how long any mixture takes to freeze will depend on a whole load of factors and these times can only be regarded as a guideline. The ICE-21 (and it’s colorful siblings the ICE-21R and ICE-21PK) are slightly smaller machines which have 1.5 quart capacities. And the dasher will often stop altogether, forcing you to remove the ice cream before it’s really ready.
However, compared with its competition, this unit took the longest to fully churn the ice creams and sorbets, upwards of 70 minutes. The touchscreen panel is also not very sensitive; we had to press down hard to activate the buttons. After taking into account the results of the tests in our kitchen, as well as customer reviews and price, here are the Serious Eats final four favorite ice cream machines. Even though I’m no stranger to the joys cuisinart pots and pans set of picking up a midnight pint, few culinary techniques feel as magical as transforming raw ingredients into ice cream and sorbet. A good ice cream machine is all you need to experience ice cream alchemy at home, and it will allow you to churn up your favorite flavors and swirl in your choice of mix-ins. It’s small enough to fit on your counter under the cabinets with dimensions of 16.7 inches deep by 12 inches wide by 9.3 inches high.
And then finally the ICE-30 with the older dasher design and the 2 quart bowl, froze just slightly slower than the newer models in my testing. But it also has a re-designed dasher that now has two blades to scrape the frozen mixture from the bowl and leaves very little space between those blades and the sides of the bowl. These machines have removable bowls that you need to pre-chill in your freezer for at least 6 hours. But they’re not really suitable for everyday domestic use in your kitchen.
If you want a machine that will churn out batch after batch without your having to pre-freeze a bowl, the Whynter ICM-201SB is the best compressor machine you can get. But if you want denser ice cream, you may prefer one of our other picks. We made a couple batches of ice cream to settle on standard recipes to use throughout testing and decided on Bon Appetit’s True Vanilla Ice Cream and The Kitchn’s Vegan Ice Cream. These recipes both cuisinart pots and pans set provided a rich, creamy ice cream so we could more easily tell when machines churned an icier end product. While the Whynter ICM-201SB Upright Automatic Ice Cream Maker is definitely a bigger investment than the Cuisinart, the convenience factor of this machine beats out everything else we tried. It saves you the hassle of freezing a bowl and, unlike other compressor models, isn’t enormous, and is easy to scoop out of and super quiet.