ON SALE: A Cuisinart ice-cream maker. Is this better than an Ice Cream Ball?

UPDATE: On the Cuisinart machine, reader Marica Bernstein writes:

We have this and it’s freaking awesome. We are people who like low-tech food making/processing stuff, but are willing to set aside this preference.

I had a spectacular crop of melons last summer– mostly rare & heirloom, some of which had gone out of production just because they didn’t ship well. What to do with all these flavorful melons? Melon sherbet.

At the same time, we suffered a number of ice cream maker disasters. Recall that we live out in the county. The best way to fix this sort of problem– the need to make sherbet and the lack of a functional ice cream maker– is the internet, although we are trying to prepare for the lack thereof.

As I said, this thing is awesome. Turns out, you can freeze melon. So we had homegrown melon sherbet a few times this past winter. It was good.

John made a nice batch of coffee toffee ice cream in it last weekend. It’s not really ice cream. It’s iced custard. There are a lot of yolks involved. But the machine handles it well. For custard you have to pre-do some stuff which takes a couple of hours, but once it’s in the machine, you’re having a taste in 20-30 minutes.

Highly recommend this little appliance.

Thanks!