The best ice cream maker 
with a compressor

The compressor one freezes on its own: it chills while it churns, so nothing goes in the freezer the night before and there is no waiting between batches. The bowl type has a tub you have to freeze first, and once that cold runs out you are done.

Less than the box says. The capacity they advertise is the bowl's, but ice cream grows as it churns, so it never fills right up: in a 2 L machine you work comfortably with a litre and a half of mix. For home, two litres is plenty; below a litre and a half you fall short the moment you have people over.

Yes, and that is the great advantage of a compressor. It is worth leaving a few minutes between batches so the motor rests, and cleaning the bowl properly, but there is no waiting for hours as with a frozen bowl.

It depends on whether you will use it. The function holds the mix at temperature for hours so it ferments; if you already make yoghurt at home, it saves you an appliance. If you don't, don't pay for it: it does nothing for the ice cream.

Between thirty and forty minutes of churning, depending on the machine and the temperature of the mix. The trick that shortens it most is not in the machine: it is put the mix in properly chilled, aged in the fridge since the day before.

No. The machine matters less than you would think: what decides the texture is the mix — the balance of sugars, fat and solids. A two-litre machine used well, with a balanced recipe, gives a better result than an expensive one with a badly calculated mix.

They are the same family under three names. Batch freezer is what the trade calls the machine that chills and churns at once, and it is the correct technical term. Ice cream maker is what we call it at home. Sorbetiere is used for both, though it often gets reserved for frozen-bowl machines, the ones that go in the freezer the night before. Everything we compare on this page is a home batch freezer: they carry their own compressor and nothing needs pre-freezing.

It depends which league it plays in. The home compressor machines sold on Amazon run from the most affordable, the Springlane ELLI, to the twin-bowl Severin, and the comparison above carries today's price for each one because it updates itself. Below that bracket sit the frozen-bowl machines, which have no compressor and cost a good deal less in exchange for pre-freezing. Above it sit the Italian Cube machines, bought direct from the maker with no public price.

Most of the ones we have reviewed are sold on Amazon, and that is where buying them makes sense: there is a price comparison, thirty-day returns and enough reviews to read before you decide. The two Cube machines are not there: they are Italian and ordered from the maker. Second-hand we would not recommend without seeing one run, because the compressor is the expensive part and the first to suffer.