there's essentially three kinds:

• Olde Style, which is the kind that uses a bunch of ice and rock salt to keep things cold. these are a joke and mostly sold as nostalgia bait. do not buy one
• Frozen Bowl, which, as you might assume, requires you to freeze a double-insulated bowl to keep things cold. you can buy a kitchenaid stand mixer attachment with one of these and, if you already own one of those, is a great way to get started. i don't use a frozen bowl mixer because i had a bad experience in an old apartment with a shitty freezer and a 95℉ indoor temperature which left me scarred and deformed¹.
• Compressor, which has a compressor to keep things cold. I have one of these. they range in price but are very much the High End option. i specifically own a Breville Smart Scoop, which i got on sale and with a stack of bed bath and beyond (z"l) coupons for like $200. i recommend it even though it's expensive. there's other options but i don't know a ton about them.

i based (haha) my recipe off the base in the Salt and Straw Cookbook and have had huge success with it. all good ice cream starts with a good base. once you have that you can do basically whatever and know that, unless you're getting silly in a way that could complicate freezing, you're gonna get something that's Pretty Good.

HERE ARE MY MOST POPULAR FLAVORS:

• Oreo: born of an attempt to make a cookies n' cream flavor for my wife, this ended up being transcendent in its own way. 3 cups base, 8-ish crushed oreos, 1 tsp vanilla extract OR 2" vanilla bean. add the oreos and vanilla in the base BEFORE churning. enjoy
• Cream Cheese Cinnamon Roll: born of a challenge from my wife to make a good cinnamon roll ice cream. succeeded first try. built different. 3 cups base, 8 oz full fat cream cheese (room temp), 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 4 tsp cinnamon. i recommend shaving the cream cheese down with a cheese grater or something. my chunks were too big and froze weirdly, but it tasted fuckin good so who cares.
• Sea Salt: 3 cups base, 1 tsp high quality sea salt, a couple drops gel food coloring if you're going for the kingdom hearts look (i am). this is my personal favorite flavor because it lets the base shine while adding a really nice depth of flavor with the salt. absolutely delicious and a great simple recipe to start with.
• Lucky Charms: 3 cups base, 2 cups toasted lucky charm cereal, 2 cups frozen lucky charm mashmallows, pinch of kosher salt. marinate the cereal in the base for like 5m in the fridge, strain it, add the salt. churn and add the marshmallows towards the end as a mix-in.
• Peppermint Chip: 3 cups base, 1/8 tsp sea salt, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp peppermint extract, 1/2 cup mini semisweet chocolate chips, 3/4 cup crushed peppermint candy. sea salt, vanilla, and peppermint extract go in before the churn; chocolate chips and peppermint candy go in at the end.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that's it i think? let me know if you have questions. i love talking about this shit.

1. emotionally

So incredibly angry at iOS oh my god. I will have to write something about it tomorrow but I am FURIOUS.

Ok, back in front of a real computer for this longer post.

So, my mom uses an iPhone. While I was visiting, she told me that she didn't like any of the alarm options provided, but she did like the default Android one (Bright Morning). I offer to change it over for her, thinking this will be easy, right? All I have to do is download an mp3 and then set it as the alarm tone. I can do all of this directly on the phone. Easy!

You cannot just set an mp3 file as your alarm ringer on an iPhone.. You can set a custom song easily enough... as long as that song is in your Music Library. But you can't add a downloaded mp3 to your Music Library from the phone (and also I don't really want this file to be part of the music library anyway??).

Now, the hack is you can use GarageBand to Share As Ringtone. Fine, whatever. It takes some time to learn how the fuck to use it, but I finally manage to wrangle GarageBand into reading the mp3 file, and I'm able to export that track as a ringtone.

But then it comes out way too loud. And on Android, I'd just change the alarm volume and be done. But that's not how shit works on iPhone: the ringer volume and the alarm volume are the same. And my mom needs her ringer to be max volume for a variety of reasons (for example, sometimes she's cooking and the phone is in her purse on the other side of the house). So I go back to Garage Band, and adjust the volume, re-export, and it's still ear-blisteringly loud.

I try this a couple more times until I finally realize that GarageBand is automatically normalizing the volume on output, which is a fucking WILD thing for an app I was expecting could be used for mastering audio to do. And it turns out, you can turn that shit off in the app if you're using it on macOS. But if you're on an iPhone then fuck you, I guess!

Now, obviously, I could sidestep all of this by just loading the damn file onto her phone via iTunes on a computer. But she hasn't had iTunes on her computer in fucking years, and why the hell should that be necessary?? This would have taken me all of 5 goddamn minutes on Android, and instead I spent several hours before I eventually realized it just wasn't fucking possible. Apple did not want me to do this, and so I could not.

Absolutely fucking ridiculous.

Enjoy!