You'll make tasty ice cream, but not always with ease

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fun to use, and home made ice cream is delicious!

Cons: Doesn't always freeze all the way, lots of work to keep it cold enough.

Author's Review
We purchased the Rival Wood Bucket Ice Cream maker two summers ago to use at our beach house. During the summers we always have long dinners outside followed by dessert, and an ice cream maker seemed like a fun addition to our eating activities. Making your own ice cream is fun, but it is not necessarily easy. There are two important factors involved in ice cream makers. The first is that the mixture must be continually stirred, and then second is that it must be kept very, very cold. Some ice cream makers require the user to control both of these factors by chilling/ icing the container and manually turning the stirring crank. The next step up in ice cream makers are ones that stir electrically, but still require manual chilling. Finally, the fanciest ice cream makers do everything for you; they electrically stir and keep the temperature low, and all the user does is plug the unit it. The Rival Ice Cream maker falls into the middle category.

The exterior of the unit is a wooden bucket. I like this aesthetically because it looks old fashioned and fits in with our wooden shingled beach house. A second container fits into the bucket, and this is the container that you fill with your ice cream mixture. In the space between the ice cream container and the bucket you must put lots of ice and lots of rock salt. The inner container should be surrounded by ice to keep it very cold. Then the electric part, the mixing motor, fits on top of the ice cream container (connecting through the lid to the mixing blade inside) and clicks into the top of the bucket to hold it in place. Then you plug it in and go. Sounds easy, right?

Well it's always a little more complicated than it sounds. First of all, sometimes it is hard to fit the motor unit on top with all of the ice there. But you can fidget around and get it to attach. The problem I have had with this and other ice cream makers is that rarely does it ever freeze to the point where you really get true ice cream. When you make your mixture you should chill it in the ice cream container before you start. But even with all the chilling and ice in the world, sometimes the turning just keeps going and going. (You are supposed to be able to tell when it is done because the churning stops when the ice cream gets hard enough.) A helpful tip is to keep an eye on it once you plug it in and drop new ice cubes down the side as the original ones melt.

If the machine doesn't turn your mixture into precisely what you would call ice cream, this doesn't mean that your dessert is a failure - I always wind up producing a very soft, frozen ice cream, but just not quite there yet. The way to remedy this is to stick the container in the freezer after you are done, and your ice cream will harden up the rest of the way. (The container you make it in becomes a storage container, and you can cork the hole in the lid that the blade had gone through.) After some practice you will get a sense of how long it takes to get the ice cream to this semi- frozen state. The problem with just periodically checking on it while it is being made is that once you disassemble the unit you can't really get the container back into the bucket b/c the ice falls to the bottom. Or if you open the top to peek in while it is still in the bucket make sure to carefully wipe away any salty water that could contaminate your ice cream!

Making your own ice cream is fun if you have enough time to do it. You can make a creamy and high fat dessert, or a healthy icy sorbet. And of course your homemade ice cream won't contain extra additives that you can't pronounce. During the summer we get lots of fresh fruit from a local farm and ice cream made with this fruit cut up in the mixture is truly delicious! So I think that for its kind of machine, the type that uses electricity to stir but requires manual chilling, the Rival ice cream maker works well, and it is fun to use because it looks so old fashioned. Making ice cream is a fun activity and kids will love to help out! It does require some effort though, so if you do buy one of these don't feel obligated to use it every single time you want ice cream…no harm in still visiting the freezer section at the supermarket now and then! The machine comes with a recipe book but of course you can use recipes from anywhere. Some vanilla recipes call for raw egg yolks, which always makes me wary of salmonella. If you are being inventive beware of how strong certain flavorings are - once I made a mint ice cream using mint extract and I put in way too much and created an overpowering ice cream. My mother has just succumbed to the lure of fancier ice cream makers and ordered the kind that chills and stirs electrically! To just plug in and go sounds so simple, but will it be as good as it sounds? Once I've tried it out I'll write a new review to let you know!