My Kenwood IM280 Ice-Cream Maker

I’ve finally got my own ice-cream making machine!

After browsing online and concluding that only Singapore has ice-cream makers for sale, I stumbled across one in Carrefour Johor Bahru!

Here it is, the Kenwood IM280 1.5L Ice-Cream Maker:

               

                    

                                   1 Power unit release lever
                                   2 On/off switch
                                   3 Power unit
                                   4 Lid
                                   5 Paddle
                                   6 Freezer bowl
                                   7 Outer bowl

Price: Around RM 280 (I got discount to RM 259)

Buy at: Carrefour Johor Bahru, Lot 138 Batu 7 1/2 (along the Jalan Tebrau-Kota Tinggi main road, at the newly opened flyover), 81100 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

It holds maximum 1.5 litres of mix (standard Nestle ice-cream box is 1.7L). Most cartons of cream come in 1L size, so with extra ingredients added to the mix, it should fit just right.

Stick the freezing bowl in the freezer for 24 hours, chill your prepared ice-cream mix, stick the freezer bowl in the machine, add in the mix and switch on. In under an hour, your ice-cream is ready to soft-serve or transfer to a box to freeze harder!

Before this, I had to make ice-cream the old-fashioned way – put the ice-cream mix into a plastic bag, put that bag into a bigger bag full of salt and ice, and massage until ice-cream mix is sufficiently frozen.

That method relies on the forced melting of the ice by the salt. In order to melt, the ice needs heat from an outside source, namely the ice-cream mix. Thus as the ice melts, the ice-cream mix freezes and your massaging keeps the ice crystals small and fine.

Four problems with that by-hand method:

1) Costly. Salt costs money, ice costs electricity bill money to freeze or money to buy from 7-Eleven. And a lot of both are needed for sufficient freezing.

2) Messy. The first times I did homemade ice-cream, a little bit of salt solution got into the ice-cream mix. Of course, the person who was ‘lucky’ enoguh to get that part of the ice-cream was inevitably Kevin Ho.

3) Cold! The salt+ice is supposed to sap heat from the ice-cream mix, but it also drains the warmth from your hands! Even with oven mitts on, the super-chilled melted salty water numbed my hands enough to warrant breaks in between massaging.

4) Unguaranteed results. Perhaps most importantly, making the ice-cream might not succeed. Not enough salt and ice, not enough massaging before giving up and stuffing the mix in the freezer… And you end up with rock solid ice-lump, not ice-cream!

Well, no more! The automated ice-cream maker really takes a lot of work out of making homemade ice-cream. Now all I need to worry about is making the ice-cream mix correctly and yummily.

I’ve already made a batch of Gula Melaka Santan ice-cream that went well (my own experimenting with recipes). And before, plastic-bag-method made hazelnut ice-cream (best flavour ever!). And plenty of experimental recipes coming up soon…

A note on finding and purchasing the IM280: I went to JB City Square (no anchor tenant???), Plaza Pelangi, Pelangi Leisure Mall, The Store and Jusco Tebrau City to look for ice-cream makers and compare prices. None of them had any. Jusco had multiple rows of fruit juicers and blenders, but no ice-cream maker.

So kudos to Carrefour! (pronounced kar-fur and not kar-foo according to Wikipedia and the BBC World service)

Tags: homemade ice-cream, ice-cream machine, ice-cream maker Malaysia, Kenwood IM280