Clear Ice

[RiversideLen]

I’ve never had any success with making clear ice. Boiling the water first is supposed to remove tiny air bubbles which allegedly makes the ice cloudy. While I tried that, it didn’t work for me. So a while back I saw special ice trays that are supposed to make clear ice. It works like this, there are 2 levels in the tray, the upper level is where the clear ice will form and the lower level is, for the lack of a better word, the dump area. The silicone tray sits in an insulted box. The principal behind this is that it is dissolved solids in the water that cause the ice to be cloudy. The clear ice tray allows unidirectional freezing of the water from the top down which forces the dissolved solids into the lower level dump area. You can either discard the cloudy cubes or use it for some other purpose.

Here are the cloudy cubes.

Clear cubes in front of the cloudy cubes.

Clear cubes.

Clear cube in a glass of water.

If you go on YouTube you can find homemade methods for making clear ice that employ the same method of forcing unidirectional freezing. Those methods tend to involve using a lot of freezer space, though.

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[RiversideLen]

The downside is that it makes large cubes that won't fit into some glasses without breaking them up (I use an ice pic). The advantage to the oversized cubes are that they melt more slowly than a traditional size cube.

[Mike Nolan]

We currently have a Hoshizaki ice maker that makes 'top-hat' shaped clear cubes.

We've had 2 other types of icemakers in the last 23 years, both ones that make a clear sheet of ice then cut it into cubes using heated wires. two that were probably Kitchen-Aid that developed coolant leaks and one that failed due to some kind of processor board failure.

The big advantage of having a 15 inch wide ice maker is that it holds about 50 pounds of ice, more than enough to load a big cooler for a long trip or to fill a sink with ice water to cool down 10 quarts of stock quickly. Also, since the older ice at the bottom melts, you never get stinky ice.

If I had space (and an unlimited budget), I'd put in a blast chiller.

BTW, slow-melting ice cubes also mean you get slower cooling from the ice, because there's less surface area exposed to the liquid. Plusses and minuses.

[RiversideLen]

I had to look that up, Mike, I'm impressed. And I thought I was serious about ice.

[Mike Nolan]

Hoshizaki is primarily into commercial ice systems, I know a guy who does commercial refrigeration work (mostly restaurants and bars), he recommends it over Scotsman these days. They started making a home-sized unit a while back and I put it in on Nick's recommendation, it has been very reliable.

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