Guide
Which ice cream maker should you buy?
There are only really three kinds, and the right one depends far less on your budget than on how often you are going to use it.
The short answer
If you will make ice cream a few times a summer, buy a freezer-bowl machine: they are inexpensive and perfectly good. If you will make it most weeks, or you hate planning ahead, a compressor machine is worth every penny. A hand-crank bucket is for the pleasure of the thing.
Freezer-bowl machines
A hollow bowl filled with coolant that you freeze solid, then a paddle that turns inside it. The cheapest route into churned ice cream, and the one most people should start with.
The catch is planning: the bowl needs a full day in the freezer, and it must be bone dry when it goes in. One frozen bowl makes one batch, so a second bowl is a worthwhile extra if you often make two.
- Good: inexpensive, compact, quiet, perfectly capable of excellent ice cream.
- Bad: needs 24 hours’ notice and a sizeable gap in the freezer.
- Look for: a bowl of at least 1.5 litres, and a lid you can pour mix-ins through.
Compressor machines
These have a small refrigeration unit built in, so they make their own cold. You pour in a chilled base and press a button, and you can make a second batch straight afterwards.
They cost several times as much and take up the space of a large bread machine, but they turn ice cream from a project into a weeknight decision. If you have made ice cream more than a dozen times, this is the upgrade.
- Good: no planning, batch after batch, usually a better paddle and a more even freeze.
- Bad: expensive, heavy, and loud enough to notice.
- Look for: a removable bowl, which makes cleaning vastly easier.
Hand-crank buckets
A metal canister sits in a wooden or plastic bucket packed with ice and rock salt, and you turn a handle. It is the oldest design still sold, essentially unchanged since the 1840s.
It makes very good ice cream, needs no freezer space at all, and is enormous fun with children, who will crank for about four minutes before losing interest. Electric versions of the same design exist and do the boring part for you.
- Good: large batches, no freezer bowl to plan, genuinely enjoyable.
- Bad: you need bags of ice and a box of salt every time, and it makes a mess.
- Best for: parties, gardens and summer holidays.
What you can safely ignore
- Very cheap novelty machines with tiny bowls: a 500 ml capacity is barely a pudding for three.
- Built-in timers and screens. Ice cream is ready when it looks like thick soft-serve, not when a clock says so.
- Attachments for stand mixers are simply freezer bowls with a different fitting. Fine, but no better.
- Soft-serve machines make soft-serve, which is a different, airier thing.
- No machine at all is a perfectly reasonable answer: see the no-machine guide.
Looking after it
- Dry the freezer bowl completely before freezing it; trapped water turns into a layer of ice that insulates.
- Never put the bowl or paddle in the dishwasher unless the manual says so: heat can damage the coolant seal.
- Store the bowl in the freezer permanently if you have room. Then ice cream is always half an hour away.
- Let the machine warm to room temperature before washing, so it is not thermally shocked.
- Keep the paddle. It is the part people lose, and the part you cannot improvise.
Put it into practice