Ice-cream makers: How we test
By batch 52 the thrill of making ice cream was starting to fade
Although an ice-cream maker is simply a paddle that churns an ice cream mix in a very cold bowl, there's more to testing than flicking the ‘on’ switch and scoffing ice cream.
We carry out a wide-ranging review of the performance, convenience and success of each ice-cream maker, adding up to a whole lot of work and extra calories for our lab assessors.
One stopwatch
We time everything we do to work out which machine is the quickest to use. This went from pre-chilling the freezing bowls or mixture, through how long the machine took to freeze the mix, to how long it needed in the freezer compartment before it was ready to serve.
Two recipes
All ice-cream makers come with a recipe book, but some are fairly sparse. Rather than testing the recipes provided with each machine, we use the same two ice cream recipes in all of them.
These recipes test each machine’s ability to live up to our expectations of what an ice-cream maker can do.
Summer fruit coulis ice cream
Fruit puree and custard, before the consistency test
This mixture of pale custard and cream and bright red summer fruit coulis shows us how evenly the ice cream ingredients are mixed.
Rum and raisin ice cream
This mixture of custard, rum and raisins shows us how well each machine copes with freezing in a small quantity of alcohol, how evenly it distributes chunky ingredients and whether the paddle could get stuck or damage the ingredients.
Four measures of ice cream quality
Every batch of ice cream is tasted by a panel of five judges who, putting personal preference aside, rate the taste, texture, appearance and aroma of each of the ice creams.
64 convenience aspects rated
Checking that it is easy to fit the components together
No ice-cream maker is perfect, but some are easier to use than others. Our detailed convenience assessment considered:
Ease of assembly
We carry out 26 individual checks to rate how easy it is to assemble the ice-cream maker, including its bowls and paddle.
Our checks take special care to consider the machines from the perspective of people who have problems with manual strength and dexterity.
Considerate design
We rate 24 separate aspects of each machine’s design, to ensure that thought has been given to helping you use it as easily as possible.
We look for everything from easy to operate, well-marked controls, to guidance that helps everyone, especially people with visual impairments, set up and operate the machine correctly.
Ease of use
We rate 14 aspects of operating and cleaning the machines, including the ease of adding ingredients through the lid, keeping an eye on your mix, their noise, washing the components and the presence of dirt traps on the paddle, bowl or body of the machine.
72 batches made
To ensure that an ice-cream maker can make a good product time after time, we made three batches of each of our recipes.