I own a few home ice cream machines before but I never really like any of them. They all require you to pre-freeze the core overnight which kind of defeating their purpose. If I need to plan ahead overnight to make ice cream I may just as well drive over to the supermarket. Back then ice cream machine with build in freezer were very expensive and you need to make a lot of ices creams to break even.
The price of self contain ice cream machine come down in price a lot in US recently. What use to be a $600-700 machine last summer is now retailing at $200-ish. I looked into 3 of the more popular models: Cuisnart. Lello and DeLonghi and finally decided to goes with DeLonghi machine. Mainly because: 1. It is on sale at William Sanoma web site. 2. Out of the 3 it is the only machine which can make both gelato and ice cream. Cuisnart machine doesn’t have a air tight cover which means it can only make ice cream and Lello is the another way around which make it a good gelato only machine.
The first 2 batches of ice cream comes out very well. Due to the mixing pad design you will not get a lot of overrun (air in the ice cream) in this machine even with the lit off. Which is actually good in my book because it is what premium ice cream is anyway.
Now what I need is to dig up my old ice cream recopies collection … 
