Cuisinart ICE-21 Review

I got a new Ice Cream Maker!! About a year ago I bought a Kenwood IM280 Ice Cream Maker. It worked OKAAYY but it wasn't great. Almost every batch of ice cream came out looking like cold sludge instead of the soft-serve consistency promised on the manual. WHYYYYYY?! I concluded that the machine simply wasnt made for our weather and sought out a better one.

The Cuisinart is not available in Malaysia but I got my mum to bring one back with her from the U.S. 

It's amazing. Just amazing.

 

The machine is extremely simple. It has four parts: the base which houses the motor, a clear plastic cover, the plastic paddle and a freezer bowl. Basically the same as the Kenwood except that the freezer bowl on the Cuisinart seems to be made of a different material. The Cuisinart freezer bowl is filled with some kind of liquid that you can hear sloshing around when it's warm. The Kenwood on the other hand doesn't as far as I can tell. I don't hear any liquid sloshing around even when its been sitting out of the fridge all day. I suspect this is the crucial difference which allows the Cuisinart to freeze liquids quickly to an almost solid state versus sweet sludge.

The one problem with the machine is the need for a Step Down Transformer. Because American machines are made for 120 volts whereas our plug points discharge 240 volts (or something), I had to get a transformer from ACE Hardware which was expensive and looks completely hideous. Bah.

Anyway, I made a custard based ice cream beforehand. This is it after having been in the refrigerator over night. Its already very thick and has a mousse-y consistency. I dump this in the Cuisinart!

The ice cream is a dark chocolate malt flavour so I crush some Malteser balls and throw them into the machine too.

Scraping some frozen ice cream off the sides

15 minutes later-------Tadaa! Soft Serve ice cream that I had to scoop out with a spoon. YUMMM.

With the Kenwood, I almost always poured the soupy cream out directly into a bowl. I'm happy now.

Overall, the Cuisinart ICE-21 is a better ice cream maker for our K.L/Malaysian weather. 

Freezing

The freezer bowl is colder and can churn ice creams with low egg and fat content. The Kenwood worked well enough with custard style ice creams with loads of eggs and heavy cream but wasn't able to turn out a smooth ice cream which didn't have lots of heavy cream and eggs in it. The Kenwood also tended to melt very quickly and by the 20th minute, the bowl begins to sweat and if left any longer the ice cream actually starts to get softer rather than harder. The Cuisinart on the other hand stays frozen for much longer and may even be able to handle two batches back to back. 

Size & Capacity

Both machines have a 1.5 litre capacity which is more ice cream that my family can eat most of the time. But the Cuisinart bowl is actually more compact and so doesn't use up as much space in my freezer.

Speed

Because the bowl is colder (and maybe because the bowl and not the paddle turns) it actually freezes much faster than the Kenwood. My custard ice cream only took about 10 mins in the bowl. Using the Kenwood, it generally took at least 20mins to get to a stiff enough consistency.