Cuisinart 100 Compressor Ice Cream Maker (Open Box)

Let's come right out of the gate with this: This machine is not cold enough to make smooth ice cream. It just can't freeze fast enough. The timer (my evidence that my machine is functioning as normal) goes to 60 minutes. 60 Minutes. I refrigerate my custard bases for 24 hours, and philadelphia-style creams for 2 hours. I generally use a very high cream content, generally 2/3rds light cream and 1/3 heavy cream or half half and half and half heavy cream, unless I'm following a recipe. Many of my recipes have high alcohol and/or higher than normal salt content, sometimes intentionally to make a smoother base. I have thawed and refrozen bad batches. I have made exactly 51 batches (I used a sleeve of 50 cups and I'm on to the next sleeve as of today). Not a single one had an acceptable texture, but the closest are the refreezes. This isn't surprising as these are just on the borderline of frozen. I know to get my base as cold as possible... but its a hard ask to insist your base is colder than an average refrigerator, but not frozen. Better ice cream is made in the winter, confirming that the compressor is underpowered or there is a design flaw in the dasher. Also the wattage of this machine is barely higher than a terrible $100 compressor I had returned directly before this one. If it's significantly colder than a machine half its price range, they're performing thermodynamic miracles over at Cuisinart, though to be fair a lot of energy is likely saved using the underpowered and constantly strained motor in the ICE 100. Technically, the ICE 100 gets twice as good a rating as that machine (I don't care enough to look up the model or brand, but it's a mass produced for rebranding unit), but it's not twice as good. My kitchenaid bowl add on, which was also terrible (because it leaks its refrigerant and takes a day to freeze one batch), sets up ice cream in maybe 10 minutes. The fast freezing makes small, smooth ice. The constantly icy texture of the ICE 100 has stifled my creativity. With my freezer bowl I was able to quickly modify recipes to see what works and what won't. This is exactly why I want an ice cream machine. While some of the ingredients of ice cream are fine for desert, I can't eat excessive amounts of sugar for medical reasons. Making a heavier cream base with maple syrup or maple sugar means, compared to store bought, I can make a more-nutritious ice cream that uses less sugar with a lower glucose load, has better flavor, and be equally satisfied eating a smaller quantity. In the kitchenaid freezer bowl - which, again, is terrible, expensive (for what it was) and no longer sold - I could make a 100% home-made (besides the cream) Salted Maple Rum-Vanilla Custard base with Maple Peanut Butter chunks with less than half the normal sweetener that had a better texture and tasted better than anything I could buy in the store. With the Cuisinart ICE 100, I can't really move past full sugar vanilla because I can't get that right. I know, I know... ice cream needs to be balanced, say the nay sayers. So, besides my recipes working perfectly in a freezer bowl, here's what I've tried... in 10 months: • Vanilla bases with home-made rum vanilla and maple sugar, also with low maple sugar and higher salt content. Also custard bases with the same content... also also maple syrup versions of the same bases... at least 30 batches of this style. I usually add ingredients to this base, but rarely do with the ICE 100 just because I haven't been able to perfect the base. • Three of the internet's top rated Vanilla ice cream recipes for ice cream makers. These were all for company or testing purposes: all were full white sugar and store bought vanilla. All tasted terrible, and had a worse texture than the formerly mentioned mixes. • The custard based vanilla bean and Philadelphia style vanilla recipes from the ICE 100 manual. The Normal Vanilla is the worst ice cream I have ever made, and embarrassingly I served this at Thanksgiving. Fortunately, I made four different flavors that were gone while this one had only samples people took to make fun of. If there were a milk popsicle flavor... this would be it. So anyway, if you're willing to pay a premium price to make low-end ice cream, this machine is fine... Actually it's not. There are a number of issues that I might overlook if the results were good (if you're not up to speed: the results are not good). I'll be more brief about issue #2 and on. Build quality of the machine is decent, but that accessories are awful. The freeze bowl is that cheap metal that turns black if you use anything stronger than a mild soap to clean. To be clear, I have not tarnished my bowl because this particular metal is a pet peeve of mine and I'm familiar with how to handle it. Generally, not-dishwasher safe metal is either clad or cheaply plated, and this is not clad. The lid and machine have a ton of little gaps and holes that need to be cleaned. You will need a tooth pick to fully clean this machine. Its is necessary to meticulously clean food processing items that aren't cooking anything... especially things that get coated with milk fat, so it's odd how difficult Cuisinart has made this process. Cleaning this machine will take longer than the ice cream making (and again, if I wasn't clear: the ice cream making is not quick). No in-use parts are stainless. The dasher is its own kind of awful and it deserves its own paragraph. The primary design focus of the dasher should be to scrape the bowl. Scraping the sides alone will stir the ice cream and incorporate air and I guess on lower powered machines you can incorporate some kind of paddle... if only to balance the load on the motor. On the ICE 100, 3/4 of the ice cream you make in a pint batch will be in the crevices of the dasher. Though the machine stays cold while you pack, you must remove the dasher to get all of the ice cream out of the tiny spaces in the paddle, which is a messy pain and takes too long. I have a specially shaped scraper just for this task. Worse, the dasher does not contact the bowl... probably because the bowl is made of cheap metal. This means a hard, constantly mixed "frozen butter" forms around the bowl which is completely different from the texture of the rest of the batch and insulates the bulk of the batch from freezing. The compressor might actually be effective if the dasher scraped... or even came within a millimeter... of the bowl. The dasher might actually be the culprit that ruins this whole machine. To be fair, there is an included paddle specifically for gelato that may work better and certainly would be easier to extract the frozen base from. I have not tried this paddle as the lower quality ingredients of gelato achieve the opposite of the low sugar, high fat goal of making my own ice cream. Ice cream made with this paddle would almost certainly be too firm as the motor is still slow, the paddle incorporates less air, and a test fit confirms it has the same wide distance from the bowl. There are more problems... The bowl holds water inside the transmission when washed. Not only does this mean that between batches, if you wash the bowl you must shake it to get all the water out (or the machine will freeze and likely break), but it also is another unreachable area for milk to spoil if any gets in there (though this would be hard to do, honestly). This machine is obnoxiously loud... imagine if you could turn a struggling cheap can opener up to ten and loop that for an hour, this is louder. If you have an open floor plan in your house, and if anyone plans on watching tv while you're making ice cream, their plans will be foiled. The ice cream base will not enter soft serve consistency before the motor intermittently stops. As there is no clutch or auto-shutdown, I'll likely end up breaking my machine attempting to get a good enough consistency to freeze. This does make ice cream. Unlike methods that don't involve a compressor, this will continuously make ice cream. The ICE 100 just won't make good ice cream. There are cheaper, even worse, compressor machines. The obvious step up from this machine is more than twice the price, making the market for such a machine difficult to navigate, Unfortunately, the Cuisinart ICE 100 might be the best machine in its class.