Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: one-minute review
If you can't get your hands on the Ninja Creami Swirl, the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker could be the next best thing. It isn't as advanced as the Ninja machine, but can produce a smooth and creamy dessert provided you keep a close eye on its progress.
Preparing your ice cream is straightforward, and Cuisinart provides an excellent recipe book to get you started. Just freeze the large bowl, blend and chill your ingredients, and you're ready to begin churning. The only catch is that you have to keep a very close eye on the machine to ensure you stop it when your mix reaches the right consistency. The dispenser relies on gravity (it doesn't push the ice cream out) so it needs to be thick enough to ooze out in a thick stream, but no thicker. Stop the churning too soon and it will be runny; too late and it won't dispense at all until it starts to melt.
The miniature hot plate for keeping sauces or melted chocolate warm is a nice touch and works well, but I'd argue that there's no need for three different topping containers – particularly since the design of their dispensing mechanism means most candies are too large. They can accommodate small items like sprinkles. finely chopped nuts or seeds, and the funnel that directs them into your ice cream as it's dispensing is a nice touch, but personally I think the machine would benefit more from a simple mechanical kitchen timer.
It's also worth paying attention to the machine's size. Because its dispenser drops your ice cream from a height, the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker is quite tall, so you'll need to measure your space carefully to make sure it'll fit. If it will, and you enjoy ice cream several times a week, it's an affordable and easy way to make your own chilled creations, experiment with flavors, and generally have fun.
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: price and availability
- List price $179.95 / £200 / AU$249
- Sometimes available at a discount
- About half the price of Ninja Creami Swirl
The Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker has a list price of $179.95 / £200 / AU$249. It's available direct from Cuisinart's online store, and from third-party retailers such as Amazon. It's sometimes available for a discount, and you'll find all today's best prices below.
For comparison, the Ninja Creami Swirl comes in at almost twice the price at $349. At the time of writing (February 2025), international prices and availability had yet to be announced.
If you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, the ice cream maker attachment works in a similar way to the Cuisinart, using a frozen bowl and a rotary motor to churn your ingredients while they freeze, but it lacks a soft-serve dispenser. It retails for $99.99 / £149 / AU$209.
- Value score: 4.5/5
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: design
- Bulky, not very attractive
- Excellent mini hotplate for sauces
- Topping dispensers aren't ideal
The Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker is a large appliance, and at 17.7 inches / 45cm, it only just fit beneath my kitchen wall cabinets. This height is due to the design of its dispenser, which is simply a tap that opens to releases your ice cream in a thick stream using gravity.
Its footprint is relatively small though (9.4 x 11 inches / 24 x 28cm), which is a smaller than its closest rival, the Ninja Creami. You might not want to keep the Cuisinart Soft Serve on the kitchen counter at all times, though; its white plastic chassis is functional and easy to clean, but not a thing of great beauty.
From a mechanical perspective, it's quite simple. There's a double-insulated bowl that you freeze ahead of time, which cools your ingredients to freeze them as they're churned. When your ice cream is ready, simply switch off the motor, open a tap on the bottom, and the finished dessert pours out in a smooth stream (provided you've judged the timings correctly).
There are three removable topping containers on the top right of the machine, which I'd initially hoped to load with candy. Unfortunately, they are only capable of dispensing very small items such as sprinkles or finely chopped nuts due to the size of the mechanism inside. Cuisinart recommends testing your toppings before filling the containers all the way to ensure they won't get stuck. All three toppings are dispensed through a single funnel, which propels them into your ice cream as it pours. During my tests this mostly worked well, but some sprinkles ended up overshooting.
The Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker also has a small hotplate on the left-hand side of the bowl, with a little saucepan that you can use to melt chocolate to pour over your finished ice cream, or to warm a portion of sauce. Its temperature isn't adjustable, but its heats very gently.
- Design score: 4 / 5
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: performance
Cuisinart provides an excellent little recipe book with the Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker, full of ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sorbet ideas that can be adapted to suit your tastes. I started with the fresh strawberry ice cream, which is a mix of double cream, milk, hulled strawberries, lemon juice, and sugar.
Whichever recipe you choose, the first step is to freeze the bowl. You need to keep it upright, but I found it fitted in my freezer's deepest drawer quite easily, and I was able to stuff it with small frozen items to make good use of the space until I was ready to use it.
Your ingredients should be blended to a smooth consistency (take a look at our roundup of the best blenders, if you've been thinking about upgrading), then chilled for at least four hours before you start churning.
When your mix is cold, it's time to begin. The frozen bowl fits easily into place inside the machine, then the lid with the churning mechanism attached clips on top. Once it's all in place, you start the machine using the switch on the left, make sure the lever on the dispenser is pushed up into the 'closed' position, and pour your mix through the L-shaped hole in the top of the lid. I forgot to check the lever on my first attempt, which was a messy mistake because the ice cream mix ran straight out of the dispenser. It was entirely my own fault.
The mini hotplate is activated by turning the control dial all the way to the right, and during testing it worked very well. It provides gentle heat while your ice cream churns, and will melt a cube or two of chocolate by the time your dessert is ready, or keep a ready-made sauce nicely warm.
Unlike the Ninja Creami Swirl, the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker relies on gravity to dispense your ice cream, so it needs to be just the right consistency. If you allow the mix to chill too long, it will fail to flow through the dispenser, and eventually the churning mechanism will stop turning. This won't break the machine, but you'll need to wait for the ice cream to thaw a little before you can continue, or remove the lid and churning mechanism (which can be tricky if the ice cream has become stiff) and scoop out the dessert instead.
For best results, don't churn for longer than 15 minutes, or 20 at the very maximum. If I wasn't sure that I'd achieved the right consistency, I found it helpful to turn off the machine, then use a spoon to scoop some of the mixture out of the bowl to assess its thickness. A simple mechanical kitchen timer built into the machine (possibly in place of two of the topping dispensers) would be a good addition to avoid accidentally over-chilling the mix.
I also found that the blades didn't quite reach all the way to the edge of the bowl, which created a layer of hardened ice cream that wouldn't dispense, though this may be unavoidable. The mix needs to be spread onto the inside of the bowl to chill it, and blades large enough to scrape it completely clean might be liable to jamming.
- Performance score: 4 / 5
Should you buy the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker
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Value | Almost half the price of the Ninja Creami Swirl. If you have a KitchenAid mixer, the ice cream attachment is cheaper, though you'll miss the fun of the soft serve dispenser, | 4.5/5 |
Design | Tall, but with a fairly small footprint. Churning mechanism is robust and mini hotplate is a great little addition. Components easy to hand-wash. | 4/5 |
Performance | Makes creamy soft-serve, though you have to catch it at exactly the right point. A timer would be helpful to help avoid over-freezing. | 4/5 |
Buy it if
You eat a lot of ice cream
Large single-use appliances such as this are tricky to justify unless you'll be using them frequently. If you're more of an occasional dessert fan, an attachment for your stand mixer may be a more economical choice.
You have kids
Custom ice creams with different toppings will definitely appeal to youngsters (or to your inner child).
Don't buy it if
You're easily distracted in the kitchen
This isn't the kind of appliance you can set and forget. You'll need to watch the consistency of your ice cream closely to make sure it's just right.
You have a small kitchen
This is a tall machine that will take up a lot of room on your counter, or in a cupboard.
Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker: also consider
Ninja Creami Swirl
The hugely popular soft-serve ice cream maker isn't available outside the US at the time of writing, but it's definitely more advanced than the Cuisinart machine (particularly its dispenser which, as the name suggests, creates a swirl as your ice cream is extruded).
KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker
If you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, this freezable bowl and churning attachment will do basically the same job as the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker, for less cash. You don't get the dispenser nozzle, though.
How I tested the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker
I used the Cuisinart Soft Serve Ice Cream Maker to prepare several recipes from Cuisinart's website, including soft-serve ice cream and sorbet. I tested the hotplate with different types of chocolate, and tried various sprinkles and other items in the topping dispensers.
For more details. see how we test, review, and rate products at TechRadar.
First reviewed February 2025
English (US) ·