Lakeland stainless steel digital ice cream maker

How easy is the Lakeland stainless steel digital ice cream maker to use?

We’d recommend doing a dry run of setting up this model as it needs to be assembled around the bowl. The manual is detailed, so putting this piece of kit together isn’t too much of a struggle.

Lakeland recommend freezing the bowl for a minimum of 12 hours. Despite the whole unit being just a little larger than a kettle, the freezer bowl itself is quite large, but not awkwardly shaped, so slotted right in.

The manual suggests ice cream takes around 25 minutes to churn and seven starter recipes are included. Dark chocolate and orange frozen yogurt is a must-try.

This is the quietest model we’ve tested; where most models make a mechanical whirring sound, this just produces a low hum.

The small digital display of controls are found at the top of the machine. The timer runs for up to 40 minutes in five-minute increments. The touch screen buttons are very sensitive, and sit very close to the feeding chute – when we accidentally spilled some ice cream mix on them, they stopped the machine altogether. This meant we had to stop, clean and restart the machine with rapidly freezing base mix inside – not ideal.

Results

Despite suggesting that ice cream takes 25 minutes to make, this isn’t what we found. We checked after 25 minutes and the base mix was very liquid. Thankfully, the lid is clear so we didn’t have a disassemble anything to check on the progress. After a further 15 minutes the ice cream wasn’t quite there yet. In total, this model ran for 45 minutes before we were satisfied with the results.

After 45 minutes of churning, our ultimate vanilla ice cream had a soft, whipped texture. There were no lumps or visible ice crystals. But it was very soft serve. We’d recommend placing it in the freezer for a couple of hours to firm up.

The ice cream was flavoursome and had a smooth mouthfeel. After 24 hours in the freezer, it looked and tasted just as we’d hoped: creamy and slow-melting.

With two sorbet recipes in the manual, we had high hopes for the results. However, we tried our lemon sorbet recipe twice and neither time were we able to make anything other than cold syrup. For both tests we ran the ice cream maker for over an hour, whilst we did see some crystal development, at no point did we reach anything resembling a sorbet. For both tests, the bowl had been frozen for over the recommended 12 hours, which was disappointing.

Conclusion

For anyone looking for an attractive, simple-to-use machine to make ice cream only, this is worth considering. Whilst it’s not the fastest model we’ve tested, it’s virtually silent and has a small footprint. Using it can get a little messy, thankfully clean up is a doddle.

Specifications

Wattage: 12
Pre-freeze or self-freezing: pre-freeze
Accessories: N/A
Pre-set functions: none
Dimensions (cm): H: 24 x W: 20.5 x D: 20.5
Bowl capacity: 1.5L

Ice cream recipes

Ultimate vanilla ice cream
Strawberry ice cream
Vegan vanilla ice cream
Buttermilk, brown sugar and rye bread ice cream
Malt chocolate ice cream
Cranachan ripple ice cream
Gooseberry ice cream

Sorbet recipes

Mango sorbet
Raspberry sorbet
Elderflower sorbet
Lemon sorbet
Rhubarb and star anise sorbet
Gooseberry, elderflower and sauvignon sorbet
Refreshing lychee and lime sorbet

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This review was last updated in April 2021. If you have any questions, suggestions for future reviews or spot anything that has changed in price or availability please get in touch at goodfoodwebsite@immediate.co.uk