It works well and it's a lot of fun

Author's Rating:

Pros: Easy to use. Fill it and go.

Cons: Loud operation. Somewhat flimsy parts.

The Bottom Line: 
If you have $250 for a freezer ice cream maker, you can't go wrong with the ICE-50BC.

Author's Review
The ICE-50 works as it's supposed to.

It makes making ice cream, sorbet, and ices a mostly effortless operation. Simply mix up the ingredients, pour them into the freezer container, attach the dasher and lid, snap it on to the motor arm, drop it into the freezer unit, and you are ready to go. Let it churn unattended for an hour and you have a frozen treat. That's it. The consistency of the end product is like a thick soft serve, but this isn't different from what just about every ice cream maker I've encountered makes. It won't be as hard as commercial ice cream until it spends a little while in the freezer "ripening." Since the unit doesn't use containers that you have to pre-freeze (and take up lots of space) in your freezer, you can make frozen desserts whenever you want. And, you can make batch after batch since you don't have to worry about freezing a container to use the ICE-50.

It's noisy enough in operation so you wouldn't want it anyplace people are gathering. The construction of the dasher (the part that stirs the ice cream), lid, and motor arm feel a little flimsy, but the freezer unit itself feels well built (it's pretty heavy too). Cuisinart offers replacements on their website for the above mentioned parts at reasonable prices. We broke the timer dial (victim of a very curious toddler) on our unit shortly after getting ours, and per my request Cuisinart sent us a new replacement dial without requiring us to send the whole unit back to to them for service. The customer service folks were very easy to work with.

The recipe book included from Williams-Sonoma is pretty but the recipes aren't impressive. The Cuisinart's manual's recipes work better. Experimentation is the best way to learn to use this thing and it's the most fun.

In summary we are very pleased with the ICE-50BC. Recommended.