The Cuisinart ICE100 BCU ice cream maker machine is one of the most premium home machines on the market. In this review I’m going to let you know whether it’s the kind of gadget you need in your kitchen. First off, what does it do? Well, it’s an ice cream machine, so, well, it makes ice cream.

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It makes all the variants in between as well. It makes gelato, it can do a sorbet, it can do granitas, that sort of thing.

And how do you use it? Well, it’s dead simple. It has a power button, it has a timer button and it has a start stop button. After you plug it in and turn it on the timer button will set how many minutes you want the dasher to run for. The start / stop button does exactly what it says: it then starts the machine until the timer is done. And that’s it.

I made several ice creams with it to test it out: you blend your mixture together and then pour them into the ice cream machine. You set your timer and you have to kind of guess how long you’re going to need.

In my experience I’ve just been setting it for the maximum time (60 minutes), and just letting it get on with it, keeping an eye on it. It’s got a transparent lid so you can see what’s going on, but I always recommend just dabbing a spoon at the top of the mixture and see how soft or firm the mixture is. That gives you a pretty good idea of the ice cream you’re going to get. You can eat straight from the tub. I would recommend always decanting and popping into the freezer until you need it. This gives a much more set result and something you can put into a bowl and enjoy.

On the downsides, you can see the size of it. It’s about 50 odd centimetres long, about 20 centimetres high. It’s also designed to be oriented towards you across your counter but you could turn it sideways.

The reason it’s that size,is because it has a built-in compressor. What does that mean? Well, some ice cream machines you might have seen in the market you get a bowl, you put that in the freezer a couple of hours beforehand, and then kick it off. Because this has a compressor inside it’s chilling that down whilst the mixture is churning. So you’re getting two for one.

Of course, you do pay for that at the front end. The machine is about £250 at time of writing. You can decide yourself whether about £250 pounds is the right price for you to have ice cream whenever you want it.

It makes an awful lot of noise. It has to be said. I’ve had it in the kitchen while I’ve been testing it and frankly it’s been too noisy to watch the telly while I’ve had it on. I’ve had to put the subtitles on. So if you have a spare room, a garage, or a room you can shut the door on, I would recommend popping it in there while it turns away. Something out of the way where you can keep an eye on it, but you don’t have to put up with the noise from it.

In terms of functionality, it, it’s pretty standard. You might even say vanilla (!). Literally you set the timer and then you have to keep checking it to see if it’s done. Some of the models I’ve seen of this one, the lid has a little gap on it that you can lift a little window where you can drop stuff in. So towards the end of churning, you may wish to pop in biscuits or fruit or nuts or cookie, you know, just to make it a little bit more exciting. This doesn’t have that but take the lid off and you can do it that way. I would say the lid is the oddest detail. I find it rotates anti-clockwise to lock, which feels really illogical to me and I always end up spinning it around three or four times till I get the teeth to engage so that it locks properly. A minor thing, but it just annoys me a little bit.

I’d also say getting all the ice cream outta the dasher once you’re finished is much more difficult than it needs to be. If you’ve turned something quite thick, you have to really poke at the blades to try and get all of your ice cream out, otherwise you’re literally washing away ice cream. I don’t believe any of these parts of dishwasher safe, so you do have to chuck everything in the bowl afterwards and give it a good hand scrub in plenty of hot water after all. Generally you’re dealing with dairy so you don’t want that sitting around.

The manual is a very functional book. It has a page and a half on how to use it,
which is basically pour in, press the timer and press start is what it says you do. Then you get about 15 recipes. You’ve got a vanilla one, lemon sorbets chocolates, ice creams. So you’ve got one of each of type of recipes, sorbets, ice creams, gelatos to give you an idea. And obviously the internet is dripping in recipes for ice cream, so you won’t be starved there, but it’s a very uninspiring book. That’s a very unsexy manual to get you started considering what you’re paying for the machine.

And that’s what it comes down to really: £250. A good enough price. I think it’s a perfect workhorse of a machine. It’s not particularly attractive, not ugly. It does exactly the job it’s supposed to.

Cuisinart ice cream machine on Amazon https://amzn.to/3WDoxx3

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