Ice, ice, baby: Your chill guide to home ice-making

Kya deLongchamps has cool clean nuggets of wisdom for boutique ice making at home

Ensure your ice is clean. File picture

I’m married to an American and, to an American, ice is not a rare summertime commodity.

His highball is topped confidently with a small glacier, and the soda or water is poured into the remaining slivers of real estate. I reckon he gets about two egg cups of actual cola into the glass. If he has a hard drink with ice, he will not tolerate a couple of lonesome, bobbing cubes that slip away to nuggets.

A former bartender, he’s explained to me (frostily) that the high ice content is very much an ingredient in the drink, diluting the booze and delivering it at a crisp temperature.

More ice means less melt, as the chill is self-sustaining with less liquid to drag the ice flow under.

Frustrated at the lack of an ice-making refrigerator (or a compliant wife who will pop out and get one), he ignores my pleas to stop hoarding the cool stuff and shovels shop-bought ice into the freezer every summer, bagged up to sit between the regular contents.

Space invaders

Well, this summer, he’s moved onto creating blocks of ice, parking old ice-cream containers in my tiny capacity.

These invaders are filled with water to freeze up for smashing into glittering shards in a plastic bag.

The cold war is far from over.

Cubes, lumps or crushed, there are a few things to know about ice and ice making.

First of all, ice can and does go off. Left in the freezer for weeks, even with the lid pressed down on the tray, it will pick up the odours around it, and can taste how binwater smells by the time you top off that 7Up.

Start of season

At the beginning of the season, take your loose ice-trays out, dump any cubes, and give them a good hot soapy wash and rinse. When buying them new, bear in mind covers will keep your trays protected from debris.

A good tip for easy release? Choose silicone over plastic. Food-grade silicone won’t crack, and it can be twisted and pushed from below to remove the cube or ball.

This overcomes the chore of pouring warm water over a hard plastic tray or tapping it on the counter to get the cubes to shift.

Again, choose models with covers to keep the taste of the freezer out of your ice. If you have an ice maker in the fridge and it hasn’t been used for a while, stale water can dribble in through the supply line.

Dump old ice, rinse the lines, and start again. The PDF for your model of freezer or fridge freezer will be archived online.

Standard, mean ice cubes are so last century, never mind last year. For utter cool for gatherings in the garden, it has to be over-sized. The bigger your balls, the better.

One mighty cube per glass means less surface area and consequently a slower melt.

Starting with trays for larger cubes, Ikea encourages us to break-the-ice with a Lufttat ice cube tray (x4), using extra volume to include mint leaves, fresh fruit (whole or mashed) lemon slices, lemonade and more to flavour and decorate drinks; €4.50, ikea.com.ie. The fun thing about ice balls is that, because of their magnifying brilliance, inclusions like fruit and edible flowers look stunning rolling around in a mesmerising bubble form.

You have a few choices here. Ice ball-making machines are universally expensive, one-trick ponies, and I would not recommend them to anyone but a publican with a cocktail crowd.

There are easily available, silicone moulds and ice-buckets to manually make ice-balls. Just fill them up as instructed and pop them into any freezer.

The bucket variety (about a tenner for a good one) is filled up, and then scrunched to release small to medium sized balls.

Use individual larger moulds if you want to make balls with dramatic inclusions.

Then there are balloons. The kind you use for water fights are ideal, as they are intended to be stretched under the tap to take the water and are a good size.

Vary the amount of water inside your balloon to suit the size and shape of your glasses. You can use forms and balloons to freeze crushed berries, juice, jellies, and more.

For the clearest balls, try boiling and cooling distilled water. If you can stand to wait, boiling any water before delivering it to the trays will improve clarity.

The LG Instaview range.

For effortless ice balls, you could also skate out and get a LG’s genius Craft Ice Maker, available with some of the company’s pricier fridge/freezers; LG Instaview range, from €2,750.

When buying any fridge with an ice maker, you can choose a model with a tank or with a plumbed supply.

The plumbed supply just takes a little more installation hassle, but it’s obviously a better choice.

Whatever water supply option you choose, when you know you’re going to need more ice than usual, empty the internal ice bin into an extra container, pop that into the freezer, allowing your machine to then top up another batch.

Iced coffee

Love iced coffee and competent enough to barista one up yourself at home? Try freezing cubes of strong coffee. As they melt, they deliver a caffeine shot back into the brew. Cool geniu