Why are soft serve ice cream machines so expensive?

by philg

Folks:

I want to serve gourmet Latin American food at an upcoming party. By “gourmet” of course I mean Sonoran hot dogs and Toblerone McFlurry (as served in Argentina) .

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To make the McFlurry I need soft serve ice cream. The only thing that I could find for home use was a Cuisinart that seems like an old Donvier with a motor to do the turning and a nozzle. I had hoped for a scaled-down version of what one sees in cafeterias. I poked around and discovered that those cost $6000. The question is why? How do they work? http://www.instructables.com/answers/How-do-soft-serve-icecream-machines-work/ talks about freezing, whipping, pressure, etc., which sounds complex but if the Japanese could design breadmakers to cost $200 why aren’t soft serve machines more affordable?

12 thoughts on “Why are soft serve ice cream machines so expensive?”

  1. The commercial ones are expensive because they have to be all stainless inside and designed to be taken apart and easily cleaned – soft serve machines are bacteria factories if they are not properly maintained. They also have to have a high duty cycle – they have to have enough refrigeration capacity to keep up with non-stop service and work day after day without breaking. Commercial service is much more demanding and everything has to be more heavy duty.

    The explanation given in your link is very garbled. All ice cream machines incorporate air into the mix as it freezes. Soft serve ice cream is just regular ice cream that has not had a chance to full harden. When you are done making ice cream with a regular ice cream machine you have soft ice cream at that point. The fresh soft ice cream is dispensed into containers and put into a freezer where it “tempers” or becomes fully hard – the ice cream that they sell in the supermarket. For commercial soft serve, the ice cream is made fresh at the point of purchase and then extruded thru a nozzle by an augur into the cone and you eat it before it ever has a chance to fully harden. If you buy some soft serve and take it home and stick it in your freezer for a few hours, it will become regular ice cream. For a McFlurry where it is going into a cup anyway, any slightly softened ice cream would work.

    The Cuisinart machine sounds exactly like what your are talking about. To make it truly like a reduced size cafeteria machine it would need a refrigeration compressor (the Cuisinart relies on a bowl full of gel that you freeze ahead of time) – even without the soft serve feature, home compressor machines start at around $200. http://www.amazon.com/Cuisinart-ICE-100-Compressor-Cream-Gelato/dp/B006UKLUFS/ref=pd_sim_sbs_hg_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1DYTB1AXME6FHJA1JZXC

    To that you would need to add the motorized agur and a nozzle to dispense the soft ice cream in pretty swirls (and raise the machine high enough to get a cone underneath. So you could make a self-contained home machine for somewhere around $250. Probably there is not enough demand to justify making them – it’s a novelty product. If you just scoop out the fresh ice cream from a compressor machine and serve it right away as soon as it is done, it won’t have those nice swirls but otherwise it will be soft serve.

    Even cheaper is this device:

    http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-IC200-Arctic-Twister/dp/B000063XHF/ref=sr_1_2?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1419282600&sr=1-2&keywords=soft+serve+ice+cream+dispenser

    WHich is just the auger part – you feed it supermarket ice cream and it pushes it thru the augur. For your party, this may be your best bet because you can keep feeding it all day – the Cuisinart gel machine only has enough chilling capacity to make 1 bowlful before you have to put the cannister back in the freezer.

  3. Does the ice cream have to dispense straight out of the machine, or could you scoop it? When I’ve made conventional home made ice cream, it’s been soft-serve texture out of the machine, not firming up until I put it in the freezer.

  4. Sevesteen: Ideally it would look as much as a real McFlurry, which does come out of a nozzle, but if we could get the taste and texture right that might be okay.

  5. Sonora dogs, if you haven’t had a real one in AZ before, bread is key IMO, try a Hispanic grocery big enough to make their own bread and see if they have bolillo rolls. Closest gringo equivalent would be some sort of French bread roll.

  6. Scott: Have I had a real one? Every time that I fly a helicopter from West Coast to East I stop at http://elguerocanelo.com/ . I really should rent an apartment around the corner from the place and just move there for a few weeks each winter. It looks as though they are open 10a-11p at a minimum. Therefore if I have breakfast on the later side I can each three meals/day at El Guero Canelo!

  8. If what you want is just “fresh ice cream at a fun party”, liquid nitrogen ice cream is both easy and fun, if you can get the raw materials and are relatively careful not to freezer burn yourself or your guests.

    If you want soft serve just like the real thing — consider paying a soft serve shop to make you a batch of your recipe, and freeze it in cups. Then just leave it out of the freezer for 10 minutes or so before serving to make them soft again.

  11. BTW, the ice cream served at McDonalds (at least in the US) is a low fat ice cream (formerly known as ice milk) so you should take this into account if you are trying to reproduce a McFlurry. The Mr. Softee-like recipe given in Serious Eats would taste very rich next to McDonalds ice cream (which may or may not be a bad thing). “Ice Cream” needs to contain at least 10% fat while the McD’s product is around 4% fat according to the nutrition facts on the McD’s site. Whole milk is 3.5% fat (plus you have to take into account the sugar and other ingredients which are 0% fat) so to get to 4% overall, you would just need a bit of heavy cream. Cream is listed behind sugar in the McD’s ingredient list so instead of 3.5 cups of half and half it would be more like 2 3/4 cups of whole milk and 3/4 cup of cream to make the McD’s product. However, commercial low fat ice cream contains other ingredients such as guar gum to prevent ice crystal formation and provide the correct mouth feel.

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