How to Make Clear Ice at Home: DIY Methods and Best Alternative Products

Part of our vision at Pynch Kitchen is to help the everyday cook elevate their cooking. Since our brand can’t make everything, we want to share tips, tricks, and authentic reviews and recommendations of the best kitchen gadgets that meet our vision.

Before we dive in, I want to let you know that I personally purchased Ice Made Clear (ICM) at full price and am not receiving any compensation from the company. For other alternatives, I included affiliate links where I may earn a commission at no cost to you.

For this post, I thought I’d start with what I consider the MOST important part of elevating your cooking: Ice 🙂. You might be asking yourself, what does ice have to do with cooking? And you’d be right in the literal sense. But when I think about cooking, I also think about hosting, and with that, I think about cocktails!

You’d be amazed by the reaction you’ll get if you use perfectly clear ice that disappears as you pour in your drink versus regular opaque ice. I have to admit, it makes me feel a little like a magician every time I do that 😀

Your first question might be, why isn’t my refrigerator ice or mold ice clear already? The answer also explains why clear ice isn't only more aesthetically pleasing but tastes better and melts slower. When you freeze ice in regular molds, air bubbles and sediments in your water create impurities that give the ice an opaque look. Unfortunately, they can also capture unwanted flavors.

To get those magical clear ice cubes, we need a way to get rid of the air bubbles and impurities while the ice freezes. There are a few ways to do this, and I find this video the best for a DIY clear ice operation:

I tried these methods but found them a bit cumbersome, and the resulting ice wasn’t perfectly shaped. So, I decided to look for a product that does it and found Ice Made Clear—or to be fair, it found me through an Instagram ad.

Ice Made Clear takes away all the manual steps and replaces them with a simple base and molds, making the process as easy as making regular ice. Here’s how it works:

1. Pick the mold with the ice cube size you want.
2. Fill the mold with water all the way.
3. Put it in the freezer overnight.
4. Voila! You have perfectly clear ice.

I bought Ice Made Clear shortly after their Kickstarter launched in 2020 and have been happily using it ever since. But for this blog, I decided to look around and found that a whole world of competitors has joined the market, offering lower-cost options, support for spheres (which I love), and even fully independent countertop machines. Here are the ones I found most interesting from reading their reviews and seeing the differences from Ice Made Clear:

• IceDuo Clear Ice Maker - A new Kickstarter: Easily make large and clear ice spheres, cubes, and diamonds for indulgence, along with bullet ice for various occasions. I’m very excited about this one, though I wish the bullet ice was clear as well.
• TINANA Crystal Clear Ice Ball Maker - The cheaper alternative. Ice Made Clear is $109 for their full set as of the time of writing this. TINANA’s set is $44.99 and offers a higher variety of molds (skulls, spheres, etc.) but limited to a smaller volume. Users in reviews say it's a bit hard to figure out, but once you do, they work great. They got 4.4 stars and 1100 reviews at the time of writing.
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• Clear Ice Cube Design Tray - I just ordered this for myself as I was writing this blog. Take your clear ice to the next level no matter how you made it and elevate it further with awesome design patterns!
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I hope you enjoyed this one. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see more posts like these.