Hamilton Beach Automatic Electric Ice Cream Maker & Frozen Yogurt Machine

Why it's worth it

A classic bucket churn with an electric motor and a four-quart stainless canister, enough for 12 to 16 servings in one go. You pack ice and rock salt around the canister, flip the switch, and it churns for 20 to 40 minutes and stops on its own.

Four quarts changes what dessert can be. That's 12 to 16 real servings from a single run — a birthday party, a reunion, a church social. A two-quart countertop machine would need three back-to-back batches and three frozen bowls to match it, which nobody is doing on a Saturday afternoon. If you're feeding a crowd, capacity beats every other feature on the list.

There's no bowl to freeze the night before. Salt lowers the freezing point of ice, and the resulting brine gets cold enough to freeze the canister from the outside in. So the cold comes from the bucket, not from your freezer. As long as you've got a bag of ice and a box of rock salt, you can decide to make ice cream the same day — which none of the freezer-bowl machines here can claim.

From our review of 5 ice cream makers, by David Sinclair, Managing Editor

What we like

• +Four quarts changes what dessert can be
• +There's no bowl to freeze the night before
• +It runs itself
• +The bucket and canister hold up outdoors

What to know

• –Every batch costs you supplies
• –The cleanup is genuinely messier
• –The texture is a little coarser