When I was a kid I used to think “Man, if I could ever afford all the ice cream I want to eat, that’s as rich as I ever want to be” - Jimmy Dean
Way back in nineteen twenty-seven, Harry Reser sang a song celebrating the virtues of America’s favorite frozen dessert, ice cream. ‘I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream’ became a cultural phenomenon and the title of the song ended up becoming part of the popular American lexicon.
The fact that it’s still being used nearly one hundred years later, just proves that some things, like ice cream, are timeless.
And rightly so, as we don’t know anyone who doesn’t like to indulge their sweet tooth and explore the cornucopia of exquisite flavors that are part and parcel of ice cream’s varied and wonderful arsenal.
Ice cream has been a staple of American life for nearly three hundred years, having been brought to our continent by Quaker colonists in the early eighteenth century.
America was raised on ice cream’s frozen deliciousness, and ever since we were first introduced to its cold magic during our formative years, we’ve been hooked on it.
After spending far too long trawling ice cream parlors all over the country and flagging down more ice cream trucks than we can remember in an attempt to try every flavor known to man, we discovered that we could actually make our own ice cream. It was a discovery that changed our lives.
In the years since we started making our own ice cream, we’ve been fortunate enough to use more than our fair share of ice cream makers.
Some have been good, some haven’t, but in all the time that we’ve been devoted to our chosen pursuit, we’ve never been lucky enough to find that one ice cream maker that we’d be happy to use for the rest of our days.
Call it bad luck, or chalk it up to the whims of fate, but so far we’ve yet to find the King of Ice Cream Makers.
At least, that was what we thought until, by sheer accident, and after listening to Harry Reser’s tribute to frozen treats for the one hundred and seventy-seventh time, we stumbled across Nostalgia’s ice cream maker, and our ice cream making world was turned upside down.
Nostalgia? Never Heard Of Them
Honestly, that doesn’t surprise us as we’d never heard of them until their marvelous ice cream maker popped up on our radar, either.
Nonetheless, it seems that this Green Bay brand has been devoting itself to celebrating yesteryear and all of the happy childhood and Golden Age memories that we all hold so dear for longer than they’d care to admit.
Subscribing to the philosophy that yesterday was better than today and will almost certainly be better than tomorrow, Nostalgia specializes in making the sort of sweet treat and snack making machines that made being young so much fun.
They’re not bothered about the future, all they care about is making yesterday live again and showing the world that everything used to be better and that nothing is more enjoyable than a little bit of retro-tastic fun.
While we’re firm believers in celebrating America’s incredible history, Nostalgia’s ice cream maker dragged us further into it than we ever dared dream was possible.
Borrowing its dashing good looks from the hand-cranked ice cream makers that filled the wagons of the pioneers as they ventured West, this ice cream maker is a glorious fusion of technology and good old fashioned know-how that uses the latter in conjunction with the former to make a timeless, moorish and devastatingly delicious range of ice creams.
Composed of four basic components (the bucket, an aluminum canister that’s used to mix the ice cream in, a dasher (or paddle), and a top-mounted motor), Nostalgia’s ice cream maker is incredibly easy to set up and even simpler to use.
It adheres to the old fashioned way of making its chosen dessert, which means that as good looking and breathtaking as the bucket that contains the whole shebang is, it’s actually a vital part of the whole ice cream making process.
Making Ice Cream The Nostalgia Way
Even though they’re keen to push their own brand of ice cream flavor mixes and emphasize that they’re the best way to whip up a mouth-watering batch of ice cream with this machine, Nostalgia also readily admits that your own mixes and recipes will work just as well. It’s salesmanship 101, but as we’re suckers for the past, we figured that we’d try a couple of their ice cream mixes, and so we set out to make some Vanilla Creme ice cream, the Nostalgia Way
As soon as you’ve mixed your ice cream, you simply pour it into the aluminum canister and fasten said canister in the bucket.
Fix the dasher into the canister, put the clear lid on the canister, and over the dasher and attach the overhead motor.
Don’t switch it on yet though, as the next step in the process is crucial to making ice cream the way that grandma used to.
And even though it’s kind of fun, it is also a little time consuming and threw us for a loop, as we’re weren’t used to becoming an essential part of the whole making ice cream from scratch idea, as we’d previously always left it in the hands of technology and our ice cream makers to, well to make ice cream.
But this time we were doing things grandma’s way, and so we lined the gap between the bucket and the canister with alternating layers of ice and rock salt, packing it in loosely and making sure that it came to the lid of the canister.
Don’t worry about the bucket leaking, it’s lined with plastic so whatever goes into the bucket, stays in the bucket. Then when you’ve finished filling the gap, flip the switch on the Nostalgia motor and it starts churning and turning your mix into ice cream.
All we had to do was keep adding ice and rock salt, which was surprisingly time-consuming. And something that we had to stay on top of as we couldn’t quite believe how quickly the ice and salt combination began to melt.
Wait A Minute… Did You Say Rock Salt? In An Ice Cream Maker?
That’s right, we did say rock salt. Apparently, it lowers the melting temperature of ice, which means that the ice lasts longer and becomes a more effective catalyst for helping to produce ice cream.
We might take ice for granted in our modern world filled with technological wonders, but the pioneers weren’t so lucky.
Ice was a valuable commodity, so they wanted to make sure that they got their money’s worth out of it, which is why they added rock salt to make it last longer.
And that’s the reason why your grandma used to add it to her hand-cranked ice cream maker too. Because she’d been taught to do things the old-fashioned way, and make the ice last as long as possible.
Back to the Ice Cream
About half an hour or so into adding ice and salt and watching the motor churn the creamy mix, our ice cream was ready, which seemed fast to us, but we guess there really are some advantages to throwing the old world and new world together.
Namely, the speed at which your ice cream gets made. It was time to taste the Vanilla Creme, and as soon as we did, we instantly became fans of doing things the Nostalgia way.
And best of all? They even throw in a recipe book, so you can learn how to make their ice cream from the comfort of your own home without having to invest in their branded packet ice cream mix.
The Past Isn’t Always Better
There’s no denying that we’re fans of this ice cream maker and the Nostalgia way of making ice cream, and normally we happily throw a coronation party for this ice cream maker if it wasn’t for one issue that we had, and continue to have, a problem with.
And that’s the components that Nostalgia has used to make it, which are all, barring the canister and the wood cladding on the bucket, fashioned from plastic.
The plastic parts make the ice cream maker feel flimsy, and almost as though they’re not going to last the course and are destined to fail at some unseen, and unfortunate, part of the ice cream making process.
To us, yesterday was all about brushed aluminum and beautifully shaped steel and that’s what we expected this ice cream maker to be made from, and when we discovered that it wasn’t, it was a little heartbreaking.
It felt almost like Nostalgia had forgotten their core mission and used twenty-first-century parts to make something that should have been made from a nineteen fifties blueprint using materials from the decade.
On the grand scale of things, it is, we know, an incredibly minor complaint but it’s one that we felt we had to address as it took the sheen off what should have been an incredible afternoon of ice cream making.
Our Deliciously Frozen Verdict
As we’ve already said, we’d planned the whole coronation ceremony for Nostalgia’s ice cream maker in our heads, and right up until we started the clean up (which is also ridiculously easy by the way), we were planning to place the ice cream maker crown on the head of Nostalgia’s finest.
After all, it’s easy to use, it looks incredible and it not only makes fantastic ice cream, but it also taught us more about making it the way that forefathers did than we ever thought possible. And that book of recipe ideas that comes with the ice cream maker? It’s worth its weight in gold.
We just wish that it felt sturdier and that the components that Nostalgia used to make it felt more akin to the period that they were designed to emulate.
That said, it hasn’t stopped us from using this ice cream maker almost every single day for the last three weeks and so far, it’s held up incredibly well. So maybe we were wrong about its overly plastic components. Maybe they will last the course. Only time will tell.