KitchenAid Cuisinart Reviews

Having your own ice cream maker is great for so many reasons, but being able to experiment with so many recipes and ingredients is the best part.

It's hard for a lot of people to believe ice cream can taste better than store bought, since of course that tastes good too. However modern ice cream makers can make some of the creamiest, freshest tasting ice cream imaginable. And you get to skip the preservatives, putting in whatever milk / eggs / cream / flavors you wish. According to this Vegan Scoop cookbook, Haagen Daas has nearly 20 grams of saturated fat per half cup while the Vanilla ice cream recipe in the book I have is around 1.5 grams of saturated fat per half cup! Oh, and half the sugar and 200 less calories. Anyway, vanilla almond milk is something I use for many recipes. Great flavor. A lot of times I just keep it simple with a nice Vanilla ice cream and throw in some fresh fruit in there at the end as the Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker is finishing.

The Cuisinart Ice 20 icecream maker has been perfect for us the last few years. The bigger Cuisinart Ice 30 BC is great too, a friend has it, but the Ice 20 is more than enough for our family of three. Since the bowl has to be frozen beforehand (more on that below), we did pick up a second bowl that was on sale. This allows us to make a second batch of ice cream after the first one is done (since of course you'd have to clean the bowl and re-freeze it).

It is imperative with any of these ice cream makers that you store the bowl in the freezer for a half a day or more (and sometimes turn down your freezer temp if the bowl is still not frozen). The cold ingredients you use should be brought out right when you need them - you want things as cold as possible if you want the ice cream served right after making it. When finished you'll want to freeze anyway to get a better consistency, but the colder the bowl / ingredients are initially the better the ice cream will be when it's immediately finished. The process only takes 25-30 minutes, and you can add fruit and other toppings towards the end.

Posted by Ken Walker at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Before buying an ice cream maker we presumed that it a hassle and time consuming to operate ice cream makers. Fortunately the performance of ice cream makers has become much more efficient with some of the newer high-end products on the market. There are some tricks and tips that we will mention to improve your experience making ice cream but overall it is not much work at all. It is a rewarding treat on a nice summer / spring day for our kid's to be able to make their own ice cream recipes in the convenience of your own back yard.

If Cuisinart has a relevant product to what we are looking for, we look hard at their products because of their quality consistency over time. The Cuisinart Ice-30BC Pure Indulgence 2-Quart Automatic Frozen Yogurt Ice Cream Maker is no different.

Having custard or ice cream is easy to set up. Custard will require a cup of milk, a half cup of sugar and 4 eggs. You use this same recipe base for the ice cream but add a cup of fresh thick cream, and vanilla. Once you set this base up you may want to freeze it for a few hours and then slowly add it to the mixture as the Cuisinart machine is working.

One key trick is to freeze the freezer bowl to make this process flow smoothly. Otherwise the ice cream making process make take over 45 minutes, when it should be taking 30 minutes or slightly under with the frozen bowl. No noisy churning for hours like the old days. This is quiet and efficient and possibly gets more complements from friend's than the KitchenAid / Vitamix blenders we have.

Maybe the only problem with the Cuisinart Ice30BC frozen ice cream maker is that you will want nice ice cream all the time! Fortunately since you get to concoct your own recipes you can put fruit and other healthy additions if you would like. A recipe manual comes with the Cuisinart Ice 30 BC but we suggest you try Ben and Jerry's homemade ice cream recipe book for succulent treats.

Posted by Ken Walker at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)