When the weather is hot and humid, my thoughts, naturally, turn to ice cream. I rarely buy the commercial stuff, except when doing a photo shoot – commercial ice creams contain stabilisers, which help them stay solid at room temperature.
There are many types of ice-cream machines and while most of them do a good job, each has its pros and cons. What they all have in common is a way to freeze the mixture while churning it; if you were just to put the mixture in a bowl and freeze it, it would be hard and icy rather than smooth and creamy.
An old-fashioned, hand-cranked device requires a lot of ice, a lot of salt (to lower the freezing temperature of the water) and a lot of muscle. It’s easy to crank at first but, as the ice cream freezes, it thickens, which means it gets progressively harder to churn. This lo-tech type of device is fairly inexpensive but not easy to find (it’s considered retro). Some models also come with an electric motor, so you can churn the ice cream by hand or with a machine.
The most common type of machine is electric and comes with a detachable bowl that you need to pre-freeze (usually for at least a day) before making the ice cream. Once the bowl is frozen, it’s put back in the machine along with the churn, the ice-cream base is poured in and it’s then churned and frozen. This is inexpensive but requires advance planning (some people store the bowl in the freezer, so it’s ready at any time). Because you need to refreeze the bowl after making each batch, you might consider ordering a spare bowl, if you make a lot of ice cream.
The type I have has a built-in freezer compressor. You chill the ice-cream base then turn on the machine before pouring in the mixture. The advantage of this type is that it’s convenient and you can make batch after batch of ice cream, without waiting in between. The disadvantage? It’s expensive.
Alternatives to these basic machines are either hi- or lo-tech. A hi-tech option is made by Pacojet. With this, you make the ice-cream base and freeze it until it’s rock hard in a canister made specifically for the machine. You then insert the canister and very sharp, thin blades spin at high speed to create micro-shavings of light and fluffy ice cream. The machine is versatile (it can make micro-shavings of any frozen mixture, not just ice cream), and you can set it so it shaves off single or any number of set portions, which means you can have freshly “churned” ice cream without having to process a whole batch. The disadvantages are many – it’s expensive and noisy, and the filled canisters need to be frozen to minus-eight degrees Celsius, which is colder than most home freezers (which are usually set to minus-four degrees).