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I have no complaints about this product. We sure like that homemade ice cream. I bought this attachment to go along with my wife's 6 qt. stand mixer and it works real well. It is a great product and I would recommend it to go with your mixer.
Since it has such a large capacity in comparison to other machines, it needs to be colder, longer, in order to freeze your cream. reminds me of the butterball turkey line, only for appliances. The bowl needs to be brought out immediately before freezing process and you must turn it on to low BEFORE putting in your mix. Hints for proper use: Make sure you store it in the freezer and that your freezer is set BELOW ZERO. With those points taken into account, it is VERY easy to use, takes no room to store (since the bowl stays in the freezer and theres no motor or base or anything) all you have to store is the dasher and the spindly thing that attaches it to your machine.
I make my own yogurt and wanted to make my own frozen yogurt too (of course regular ice cream is made as well). A normal freezer in your kitchen is often more in the range of 10-15 degrees. Also you NEED to refrigerate your recipe for well over an hour to make sure that it is well chilled, again, the colder it is going into the machine, the colder the bowl will stay so it can do it's job. Also, if you lose you directions, like I did, before you know what you're doing, the customer service number at kitchenaid is full of very nice people. After much research I decided that this was the ice cream maker for me.
It's perfect if you have a deep freezer since they are usually kept at -10 to 0 degrees. If you don't, as with any machine with a frozen bowl, your liquid could freeze quite thick before you turn it on and your dasher will sieze up.
My wife thinks this the ice cream is just as good as cold stone. We love ice cream and the recipes are fantastic. Now, I'm not sure it's that good, but it's better than the stuff we buy from the market for sure.
I'm not sure why some of the reviewers are surprised that the ice cream isn't rock hard right out of the machine - I guess they don't read the manual.I'm looking forward to making more esoteric flavors of ice cream in this new KA attachment. It's a keeper. We listened for the "clicks" and stopped the machine when we heard them, as we knew that letting the ice cream churn longer would only make it less solid. We didn't use any of the recipes in the booklet that came with the KA, but rather took a recipe from our favorite ice cream cookbook, The Ultimate Ice Cream Book: Over 500 Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, Drinks, And More by Bruce Weinstein (Paperback - May 19, 1999), available on Amazon.It tasted quite vanilla-y, had a good mouthfeel and was delicious as only a home made ice cream can be. I wasn't sure if my smaller recipes would work in the KA but there was no problem with the ice cream we made. I have to preface this review by saying we've only used the ice cream attachment once so far, but I've used other ice cream makers in the past and can reasonably compare them.The KA attachment makes a larger batch of ice cream - 2 quarts to the other brands' 1.5 quarts. We chose a simple vanilla recipe to start with. Of course, it was the consistency of soft ice cream when we took it out (as all home made ice cream is, right out of the machine) and transferred it to a container to freeze to a hard consistency.
A little more "set up" than a countertop model, but well worth not having another appliance that takes up space.
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