Here at Leedsfoodie.co.uk, we love a good kitchen gadget. In fact, it is almost a fully accepted fact that if you are a parent and want to make sorbet or ice cream at home, you need an ice cream maker; there is absolutely no time in life to do the churning needed for whatever recipe you have decided on by hand without any assistance from a machine!

With this in mind, you have two choices:

1) Don’t bother trying to make ice cream and buy shop-bought stuff instead

or the FAR more exciting option…

2) Buy an affordable machine that will do the hard work for you and enable you to have some fun with the kids trying out new flavours

With prices as low as £26.99 (normally £44.95) from the Savisto website, this is definitely at the affordable end of home ice cream machines, so you can try out mastering this skill without spending a fortune. As an added bonus, the Savisto model also comes with a recipe book, giving great tips to inspire your ice cream and sorbet making.

We decided to try out our Savisto machine by making raspberry sorbet. Initially, we must confess that we rushed into things and didn’t realise that the fast-freezing bowl needs to be frozen before use, so please read the clear instructions and follow them if you do decide to get this product! If you don’t then, like us, your initial sorbet or ice cream experience will be delayed overnight while the fast-freezing bowl gets cold enough to help freeze what you make.

After a really fun process involving mixing liquid glucose, raspberries that had been blitzed, and a whole heap of sugar into a raspberry reduction, we were ready to get our machine set up and churning.

The machine was dead easy to assemble, with the freezing bowl, churning parts and digital top all fitting together very easily. With our machine assembled, the reduction was poured into the machine to get it churning, an easy process thanks to the funnel of the machine being large enough for any measuring jug to pour into without making a mess.

The digital timer makes it easy to know how long is left when it comes to churning and you can easily program it for as long as you feel you are going to need.

After 40 minutes, the sorbet was 95% of the way there, but we felt that it could do with a quick blast in the freezer to harden up a bit (we’re fans of very frozen ice cream!), so perhaps this is something to bear in mind when checking on your mixture.

The mixture came out perfectly mixed and tasted delicious and overall was a fun, easy process. Most importantly, there was no really intrusive whirring noise in the background as the machine was surprisingly quiet while pulling off its magic.

Thanks to Savisto for giving us a chance to try out this great gadget!