Hello, I'm Matt and in this video we're going to be making an instant ice cream maker.
The way this works is pretty unique as far as ice cream makers go, as this top tray is
super cooled by dumping the heat into the water surrounding it, allowing water, like
you see here, to start freezing almost immediately and ice cream to be made in just a few minutes.
Now this might sound a little bit complicated but it's actually super simple to build, so
before we start making some ice cream with this, here's how to construct one.
There are three main components we'll need for this build - a heatsink, a tray, and some
Peltier elements.
These Peltier elements are basically heat pumps - when electricity is applied they shove
heat from one side of the plate to the other.
This process means that, while one side is kept very cold, the other gets extremely hot,
which is what the heatsink is for.
This needs to be quite substantial in size, as it has a lot of heat to contend with.
As both of these items aren't something you're likely to find locally, I've placed international
purchasing links to them in the description.
As for the tray, it can be roughly the same size as the heatsink, and it needs to have
a flat underside so that it touches the heatsink evenly.
I'm just using a butter tray, but it's not too specific so choose anything you can find
that's suitable.
So the first thing to do is get some heat paste, add a blob of it to the heatsink, and
then squash a peltier elements down on top with the text side facing upwards.
Once they're all on, we can add yet more heat paste on top, and then squash on the tray
itself, which can then be secured in place with cable ties.
These need to be really tight for good thermal contact, so you may require the help of a
clamp and pliers.
Once this is done we can tidy up the cables.
To do this we can simply thread one side through to the other, and group them by colour.
With that done the last thing to do is sort out the power supply.
As all six Peltier elements draw about 400w, we need to use a pretty beefy power source.
Luckily computer power supplies have been able to deliver this kind of power for a long
time, so you should be able to pick up a second hand unit for very little money.
I happen to have a 1000w server PSU on hand, so I'm going to be using this instead.
The power supply's 12v output simply hooked up to the Peltier elements, with red being
positive, and black being negative.
I'm using an XT60 connector in between so that they can be disconnected easily.
So now we're ready to try it out!
Now as you might have noticed this channel is called DIY Perks and not Cooking Perks,
so I'm not actually that great at cooking so we'll see how this goes.
Thankfully the recipe does appear to be quite simple, so even I might not mess it up.
So the first thing to do is get some whipped cream - this is like, well, we're going to
whip this cream - this is double cream, so we'll empty about half of it into a bowl.
Uhh, that's a lot of cream.
Um, I'll go with a quarter for now actually, don't want to make too much, and just use
a whisker to whisk it.
Now you could of course do this by hand but I can't be bothered to wait for that so we'll
just use modern technology for now.
Right so I think that's done, so that means we need to add about 100g of sweetened condensed
milk.
This is all very approximate really, it's not very precise.
So we've got a quarter of this, which is a 397g can and a quarter of that, which is a
600ml can.
Oh dear this is making such a mess.
That's part of the fun.
So we'll again just mix this together.
So that should be the base of the ice cream, and to this we can add pretty much any flavour
we like.
So I'm just going to add a bit of vanilla to the flavouring.
To add some flavour (lol).
So now that's all mixed in with the flavouring it's time to put it into the ice cream maker
itself.
So I'll just move these to one side.
Before this gets turned on we need to add the water, because this heatsink is going
to get incredibly hot, and that heat needs to go somewhere so it gets basically dumped
into the water, so we need to fill the whole thing up to about the top of the heatsink,
and now we can add the ice cream mixture to the tray, and plug it in!
So now what's going to happen is this tray is going to get really cool, and hopefully
freeze the ice cream mixture.
Okay so this has been going for about 2 minutes now, and as you can see, that's pretty frozen!
The top's still a bit squishy but the actual underneath is quite ice-creamy, so that's
really good.
I'll just spread that out a bit, and give it an extra minute and hopefully it'll be
ready Okay so that's looking good it's pretty solid,
so now it's time to put it into the bowl, and this needs to be done extremely quickly,
as the heat from the heatsink will very quickly transfer into the ice cream if I'm not fast
enough, so I'll just unplug it, and put it into the bowl.
I've only made a tiny amount as you can see but not bad.
Now texture wise it's not going to be exactly the same as proper churned ice cream, but
taste wise it does taste really good - quite rich and flavoursome.
One of the best advantages of being able to make ice cream so quickly is that you can
experiment a lot with the flavour - for example, earlier I tried making some carrot ice cream
which actually tasted pretty good.
You could even use it to make some ice in under 5 minutes if you want to cool down your
drink, which is pretty cool as well.
I hope you've enjoyed this video - it's been quite fun for me to make as it's been quite
different.
Other than that, I'm Matt, and you've been watching DIY Perks.
I hope I see you next time!
If you'd like to see another of my projects, then why not check out how to make this super
smooth camera slider, which is a fantastic way of getting really cinematic camera shots
on the cheap.
Alternatively, why not check out another project involving peltier elements, this time using
them to generate electricity and charge a phone.
They're both worth a watch, so I hope you enjoy them.