Welcome back to Kitchen Gadgets. I'm here with the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream maker that retails at $68.99
I'm super excited for this because as soon as I laid eyes on it
I was like, "I kind of want that!" Right off the bat you see you have a lever that dispenses your
soft serve ice cream right into the cone
You have your little area where it can stack the cones which is super cute.
And then, this is the kicker, you have three compartments where you can store
some toppings or "mix-ins" as they call it and make your own little, like, flurry.
So we take off the lid. This is supposed to be very easy. Just take off these little guys.
There's a lot of little parts to this.
You know, any gadget that has a lot of, like, little parts makes me nervous because once you lose one of the parts,
which I do all the time, it's like you're kind of screwed.
We got our mix-ins in, I got my cones already stacked in here
and now for the ice cream base. This works very similarly as the regular ice cream machine where you freeze the inside bowl and
churn your ice cream in there.
one thing about this whole that differs from the other ice cream maker is that this has a hole where it's gonna dispense your
soft-serve. You do want to freeze this a day ahead so that you know that it's frozen solid. If you hear anything
it means that it's not frozen completely and you want to make sure that it is completely frozen for the best results.
So we're testing the most simple soft serve ice cream type
which is just vanilla and this is awesome because
you don't have to temper eggs, it's just straight milk and heavy cream and sugar, a little vanilla.
You just mix it in a bowl, put it in,
churn it, and you've got ice cream. I mean that's pretty phenomenal.
There's two little clicky buttons here that you want to click to get the top off.
There we go.
And you see this is like the churning device that will actually churn your ice cream. And your frozen bowl goes straight in.
So we're gonna put our top on first before pouring the mix in,
and our super simple mix is just gonna be poured straight in here.
The kicker is that you do have to watch it churning just because you don't want it to overchurn
and what happens is that it just becomes ice cream and at that point
it won't dispense out of this 'cause it'll be too thick. Okay ready?
Go.
So we've done a previous test before with ice cream makers and
they're really finicky because of the bowl.
You really, really want it to be frozen solid,
you know, just do it a lot longer than what it recommends. And also another tip is
maybe you want to pre-chill your ice cream mixture as well.
We threw our ice cream base in the freezer for about 30 minutes to pre-chill it just so we're super safe.
One thing is that it's only an on and off button,
so that means that I have to watch this constantly
which is kind of annoying to do, and also I'm like a little bit
vertically challenged, just a little, and it's really hard for me to see the top.
I have to kind of like, go like that, or wear heels or stand on a stool or whatever.
Also remember that this only comes with one bowl
which means that after you churn it once, it's gonna get warm. You have to refreeze it, so you actually can't make a second batch.
Even if you wanted to, you have to wait 24 hours.
So it's been four minutes.
It's still a little loose, but you can see that the sides are sort of like, coming together. It's starting
to cling, but it definitely needs more time.
Okay,
so we're currently at ten minutes. My ice cream is still looking very soupy.
It says to check at 12, but it should be done in under 20 minutes. Please come together 'cause I want you to work.
Alright guys, it's the moment of truth. It was a hell of an effort to get here, but we're here nonetheless.
My ice cream looks good. We'll start dispensing before this overchurns. We're just gonna
go for it.
Okay, its dispensing, not like in a beautiful
single stream, but doing my best to make it look good.
There you go.
It's creamy, soft.
It's good. Next we're gonna test our mix-ins and
in order to do that, you're just gonna pull the lever on whichever one you want.
I'm gonna go for Oreos and peanuts.
And obviously it's a little awkward because I'm doing this from behind so you guys can all see it happening. Oh, wow. What the...
All right, so the mix-ins are just kind of like splurting in there.
Okay, I can see it coming down, but I'm not getting much of it. It's not really coming out.
Hello?
Okay, it just needed maybe a little bit of help. I'm gonna stop now, I'm just gonna stop.
Um, that's really messy and disappointing. I feel like the mix-ins are just like, splurting out randomly.
So it looks like there's a little ramp
that helps disperse the toppings while the soft serve is dispensing.
So it's not really accurate and it's pretty disappointing. Honestly. I don't know why you wouldn't just like, top your ice cream.
We're just gonna keep going now. The final thing I want to test:
volume. I want five ice cream cones. Let's see if I can make five cones from this.
This looks so sh***y.
All right, I'm getting the hang of it! Not really. Oh my gosh!
Sad ice cream. So it looks like we're about at the end.
There we go.
Yep, only a few drops left. Okay, and that is all, guys.
So I did get a good amount of ice cream, but it just, like, melts really fast. I mean look at that.
It's been like what, like, three minutes and already we're at melting stages of almost all of them.
So eat quick. So, not the prettiest, the dispensing. And it doesn't look beautiful,
but nonetheless we got a lot of ice cream cones.
There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven cones - six and a half cones. So we got the volume there.
Does it look nice?
No, it doesn't at all. Your kids might be disappointed, but you have ice cream.
So it seems like the steady stream of ice cream is not like that
beautiful stream that you see in the ice cream store.
Usually there would be something that's, like, pushing the ice cream down but for here
it's kind of just like free-flowing down so you don't get that beautiful nice shape.
It's just kind of like, very random dispersing. Also the mix-ins didn't work really well.
I would say that it's just for the look and really it has no functionality.
I recommend just, like, literally topping your ice cream because it just doesn't work. I would say though it is really fun.
It looks cute.
And those are the positives.
It's not very positive. So for more kitchen gadget tests click here.