Clyde loves making homemade ice cream, but our efforts to find a helper monkey to turn the crank and spoon up the end product for us have failed to be fruitful.
We bought one of those tiny Krups machines — the ones with bowls that must be frozen in advance — but grew weary of the space the bowls take up in our icebox. So when Clyde’s birthday rolled around, I jumped at the opportunity to buy him the nearly $300 Cuisinart ICE-50BC Supreme Ice Cream maker — one of very few home ice cream machines that doesn’t use a pre-frozen bowl. According to the box, you just add your ingredients, flip the switch, and — presto! — thirty minutes later, you’ve got delicious “commercial” ice cream right at home.
Um, no.
Ignore the rave reviews on Amazon.com. This gadget’s a turkey — and an expensive, noisy turkey at that. The Cuisinart ICE50-BC makes about the same amount of noise as, say, a small jet engine — so you can forget having a conversation anywhere within several meters of the device. The churning motor fits clumsily atop the unit — so clumsily, it barely connects with the outlet that powers it.
But — worst of all — the unit we brought home from Williams Sonoma simply didn’t have enough freezing power to chill our sweet cream and peaches down into anything remotely like ice cream. Even after the manufacturer-recommended 24-hour wait to let the freezing component “stabilize,” the most we could produce — even with three continuous hours of horrible, ear-splitting churning — was a thin, soupy gruel just a few degrees lower than room temperature.
The thing may simply have been a lemon … but we’ll never know. After lugging that 31-pound sucker from one end of Lenox Mall to the other — and then lugging it back — I wasn’t in the mood to give another ICE-50BC a try.
Not recommended!
Wow! And I was so hoping this was a good thing!
Thank god you bought it at Williams Sonoma with their liberal return policy.
Alton Brown from the Food Network’s Good Eats says the best thing today is still the hand cranked buckets. Something to do with needing a person to gaugeapply the force needed to “crank” out good ice cream. Now I see why.
Didn’t anyone ever tell you that home-made ice cream doesn’t take the same if you’re not sitting on the wooden bucket on your grandmother’s porch hand-cranking it 🙂
Actually though, I’ve made excellent ice-cream (the non-cranking kind) with the machines that have a paddle inside, then you freeze them. So what you really need is… a bigger freezer!!