Product review: Cuisinart ICE-40BK Flavor Duo ice cream maker

'ol Double Barrel

You may recognize this ice cream maker, as it has been featured in a few of my recipes.  The Cuisinart ICE-40BK Flavor Duo ice cream maker, or "ol Double Barrel" as I affectionately call it, has been a welcome contributor to a lot of creations ever since I got it.  Not that we are making ice cream constantly at home (summer is of course high season), but I love being able to make frozen treats at will.  Case in point, when we made the blueberry atole recently,  I had no intention of making atole ice cream until I was looking at what we had left over from enjoying normally, then decided it was time for a round of "will it churn?".  Since the freezer barrels are always frozen and ready to go, it was a simple matter of chilling the atole, assembling the machine and hitting the button.

The fact that this machine has two chambers makes it stand out for a number of reasons.  The first is that you can spin two flavours at once - an obvious plus, especially if hosting a kids party.  The second reason is that the combined capacity of the two chambers is greater than that of a single chamber machine, allowing for larger batches of a single flavour to be done.  A third plus is that with two chambers, you can take a normal batch and divide it between the two and simultaneously cut down the churning time and improve the quality of the outcome.  Generally speaking, the faster you can churn an ice cream base from liquid to frozen, the smaller the ice crystals, and thus the creamier the ice cream.  Beyond that, the machine is ridiculously user friendly - there's a switch for selecting one or two chambers spinning and an on/off button.  That's it.

That said, if you have been thinking of getting an ice cream maker, a two chamber model definitely has some advantages, and this one has given me years of great service - CHECK IT OUT HERE.