Dear Readers,
The Cookbook Test primarily functions as a book review column, and I - like you - love the hell out of books. I love picking them up, I love flipping through them to take their measure, I love diving deeply into recipes that intrigue me, I love trying to afix them in the huge star chart of other books I know so that they’re properly categorized and available for future use (or purging.)
But, for what it’s worth, I love gadgets too. A bad gadget is a waste of space but can still offer interesting insights into what consumers want - or what companies think consumers want. And a good gadget can transform the way you cook and eat.
Years ago, I bought a unitasking deep fryer, and I have fried so many wonderful things for friends and family since that I can’t imagine owning a kitchen without one. On a lesser level, gadgets like our sous vide immersion cooker, our Nesco portable oven, and our burr grinder for coffee have all changed our menu and capabilities in ways that feel noteworthy.
So: Every once in a while, a company (OK, OK, it’s always Gourmia) reaches out with a gadget and offers to send it my way in return for a thoughtful review. And when it’s something that feels new - like the Gourmia Food Station or the Gourmia Pizza Oven - I’m happy to do so. These things have a way of expanding my horizons and, I hope, expanding the horizons of everyone who reads these updates.
So when Gourmia reached out offering a new Soft Serve Ice Cream / Milkshake / Frappe / Sorbet / Slush / Spiked machine, I was instantly intrigued. The thing has built-in cooling (no need for pre-freezing), a “keep cold” option that keeps things cold for 3 hours, a topping dispenser, a topping warmer, and a removable cylinder (for cleaning).
Without further ado: kitchen notes from a handful of run-throughs on this fascinating frozen dessert station.
THE NOT-GREAT ASPECTS
If you’re going to own an ice cream machine - or, at least, this ice cream machine - you’re going to have to acquire a certain familiarity with the way its ice cream-facing parts work. That means removing, cleaning, and replacing the hopper, the corkscrew blade, the freezing cylinder, and the three-part dispenser unit.
The hopper and blade are pretty straightforward, but taking the dispenser apart is a bit tricky, and I found removing the cylinder for a post ice-cream making clean step to be downright challenging (I ended up using a measuring spoon to help pry it out) and messy. This was made worse by the fact that I missed the bit in the instructions about always removing the hopper before you remove the cylinder, something that has made subsequent cleanings easier.
Making ice cream necessarily involves a lot of quickly melting highly sweetened fatty dairy product, but coming face-to-face with that process and that mess is a lot to adapt to.
Gourmia’s instruction manual also lacks much detail in terms of recipes - there are simple base recipes for fruit slushies and vanilla ice cream, for example, but little in the way of guidance for introducing flavors and ingredients beyond the (correct) advice that anything you add should be at least pulped to jam-like consistency.
I improvised a strawberry ice cream by replacing 1/2 cup of the 2 cups of whole milk with a strawberry puree (8 oz. strawberries, 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice, 1 Tbsp sugar), and it worked, but that was sheer guesswork on my part.
THE GOOD BITS
The actual process of making an ice cream batter takes mere moments, the ratios are clear, and the act of introducing the batter to the machine is effortless. Once you’re loaded up, picking a style takes mere minutes and then you can leave the room while the machine does the work.
THE GREAT STUFF
The great part about this unit is that it is MASSIVELY fun to use and serve from. Kids in particular absolutely freak out at the fancy extras - the cone holder, the topping warmer, the optional star shaped dispenser nozzle, the sprinkle dispenser, the joy of filling your own cone with just-made ice cream.
The actual ice cream is also delicious. It’s not a super-premium Jeni’s or Ben and Jerry’s level product, but it’s better than most standard store brands - it mostly tastes of sweet, fresh dairy and if you use natural ingredients for your flavor purees, they come through elegantly on top of the understated vanilla flavor of the base ice cream. (You can also halve the amount of vanilla extract if you want to clear the way a bit for subtle puree flavors.)
We’re also excited to discover more about slushes - we tried a slush using Mandarin Orange Calpico from the local Asian market, and appreciated how surprisingly chic it tasted considering its humble roots. And we tried making a chocolate shake, absolutely loved it, and are stoked to experiment with some chocolate-banana and strawberry-banana variants.
As a die-hard food person, I’m planning to mess around with a lot of interesting variants and concepts, and the odds of me striking gold at some point seem pretty good. (Plus: My son wants to try making a barbecue sauce-based ice cream, which is deranged but definitely funny enough to try out. If anything comes of that, you’ll be the first to know outside of my house.)
THE VALUE PROSPECT
At $200 via Costco, the Gourmia 2-Quart Automatic Soft Serve Ice Cream & Frozen Drink Maker falls into that middle zone of kitchen appliances / gadgets - neither so expensive that you need to go through a formal budget process with your spouse or partner or roommates, nor so cheap that you’re likely to pick it up on impulse. It’s not small, so it requires either generous counter space or relatively expansive storage.
It is, however, HIGHLY entertaining to use. For gourmets and aspiring gourmets, the freedom to mess around with an entire world of frozen desserts and cocktails is highly entertaining - I saw a whole world open up the first time I successfully used this machine.
And for anyone with kids or kids floating around in your orbit, this thing is an entire afternoon’s activity (or a robust party-supporting element) unto itself. It’s easy to make up new flavors, easy to load, and easy to dispense. And if your kids are big enough to dismantle and clean the thing, there are definitely some important “you really wanted a pony so you have to clean up after it and feed it”-type lessons to be learned, too.
THE GOURMIA SOFT SERVE ICE CREAM MAKER
(***BUY IT / BORROW IT*** / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)
There are certain people whose family setups and/or food-related lifestyles pretty much demand a device like this for research and/or entertainment purposes. It would make a terrific gift for anyone with small kids, or even medium-sized kids. Otherwise: A friend group or cooking club of 5-10 people would profit by having one of these on standby for sharing and special events. Minus a big kitchen or ample storage, being able to loan out or borrow one of these seems like the dream scenario.