There’s an unseasonably arctic chill in the air, and we’ve just had several inches of snow dumped on our doorstep. No doubt about it, it’s time to make ice cream.

It’s true, ice cream season never ends in our household. One year the gelato machine tried to hibernate, but we tracked it to its lair and roused it, because we needed to make pumpkin and chestnut ice creams more than our weary, secondhand Simac needed to rest.

There are several compelling reasons to buy an ice cream machine; it opens up a whole new world of flavors you won’t find in any store, and you can use ingredients tailored to your own dietary preferences and needs, whether you’re a stickler for all-organic or just trying to cut back on dairy fat. And it’s equally good at making sorbet, frozen yogurt or soy-based frozen desserts.

The best reason of all, of course, is that ice cream is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Voltaire believed that ice cream was so good it ought to be outlawed; "Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn’t illegal." I guess that makes fresh homemade ice cream the ultimate offender.

Ice cream, like everything from noodles to Nanos, comes from China, where Marco Polo supposedly discovered it and brought it back to Italy in the 13th century. Historians have some doubts about this claim, but once you’ve got a perennially popular pool game named after you, your place in history’s pretty much assured anyway.

Thomas Jefferson became so enamored of ice cream while serving as Secretary of State in France that he brought a “sorbetiere” home to Monticello, along with some meticulously copied recipes.

Jefferson observed that “snow gives the most delicate flavor to creams,” which goes to show that I’m not the only one who thinks winter is the perfect time to make a batch of ice cream. Thankfully I don’t have to scrape snow off the sidewalk to make it, though.

There are several categories of ice cream machines commonly available, from the old-fashioned hand-crank style that calls for rock salt to the high-end gelato machines such as the one we use when we’re upstate on weekends.

The hand-crank style has a certain off-the-grid charm, I’m sure, but I have no firsthand experience with them and that whole rock salt thing strikes me as an exercise in needless nostalgia. So I’m going to focus on the two styles of ice cream makers we’ve tried ourselves: the less expensive, smaller models with a gel-filled canister you have to keep in the freezer, and the larger, pricier machines that come with their own built-in compressor.

Sadly, when it comes to ice cream machines, you really do get what you pay for. Stephen Metcalf, a fellow ice cream fanatic, researched the best ice cream machines in a piece for Slate recently, and concluded that it was no contest: the built-in compressor styles win hands down.

Metcalf sums up perfectly the problem I have with the smaller machines: “almost all ice cream machines designed for home use produce a milkshakey goop barely recognizable as true ice cream. You must transfer said goop to a clean, airtight container and freeze it for at least two hours (for it to properly “ripen,” as we ice-cream nerds like to say.)”

The problem with the gel-filled canisters is twofold: the temperature in your home freezer is never going to be as cold as the temperature a built-in compressor provides, and then, as soon as you take the canister out of the freezer to make the ice cream, the gel surrounding the canister starts to thaw, virtually ensuring the end result of your efforts will have a texture softer than ecto-plasm, and just as yucky.

We’ve experienced this problem first hand with the Krups ice cream machine that’s taken up valuable real estate in our city freezer for several years now. Every time we used it we were reminded how much better our upstate gelato machine works; although the texture of the ice cream our Simac produces is a bit soft when it’s freshly made, it’s eminently edible, unlike the “milkshakey goo” which is all our Krups seemed capable of producing.

So we evicted the Krups and bought another Italian gelato machine, this one by a company called Nemox. We chose it in part because it’s the smallest of the built-in compressor models, a critical consideration for space-constrained urbanites. It cost about $220, which is a lot to spend on an appliance, but some things are worth splurging on, and I believe this is one of them.

As for our old Krups, I dropped it off at the Salvation Army, and took a few minutes to look around. While I was browsing, they slapped a $5.99 sticker on the Krups and put it up for adoption. It made me kind of sad to see the Krups reduced to this station in life. But not as sad as the person who buys it will be when he or she finds out it’s just a glorified milkshake machine.

We’ve been putting our Nemox through its paces, with three batches of ice cream so far:

1. The Rocky Road to Chocolate Heaven: I started with my trademark dairy fat free chocolate base (adapted from Bruce Weinstein’s Ultimate Ice Cream Book) using Valrhona cocoa powder and bittersweet Callebaut chocolate chips, then added Tiny Trapeze chocolate marshmallows and cocoa powder-coated almonds. Our goal was to see how much chocolate we could pack into each cubic inch. The end result was a monument to the wonderfulness of chocolate that did not stand for long in our freezer.

2. Emeril’s Blue Cheese-Pear Ice Cream: I had a pound of overripe comice pears and the remnants of my research for last week’s ode to blue cheese languishing in the fridge, so this seemed like a good idea. All I needed was the Riesling. Sad to say, it tastes as weird as it sounds. The combination of blue cheese and pear makes a great salad, but as an ice cream? Not so much. Come to think of it, I wasn’t crazy about the ricotta ice cream at Otto, either. Maybe the whole concept of savory ice creams is fundamentally flawed.

3. Spiced Cranberry Sorbet: Another winning recipe from Bruce Weinstein’s book. Matt had bought a bag of fresh organic cranberries with no particular plan in mind, so I appropriated them, along with a bit of Beaujolais-Village, to make the sorbet. The recipe calls for passing the cooked cranberries through a food mill but since we don’t have one in the city (we do all our canning upstate) I cheated and pureed, or rather pulverized, the cranberries in our vintage Vita-Mix instead. With a dash of cinnamon, clove and lemon zest, the flavor was intense and refreshing. I think I’ve found the perfect palate cleanser for next Thanksgiving.

Next week, we’ll start auditioning prospective flavors for our Christmas Eve menu. Matt’s leaning towards a chestnut-Sauterne gelato. I’m toying with the idea of some kind of frozen incarnation of the much maligned holiday fruitcake. At least mincemeat’s sweet.

Image credit: Two winged cherubs, wearing fancy hats, and eating very large dish of ice cream, with very large flowers on floor. c1879 Currier & Ives.