Finally Taste Great Ice!
Built-in ice-making has made ice a fast, easy & expected commodity in the world of consumer refrigeration, but as is often the case, what is easy and fast is not always good – in fact, that’s understating it, how many times has fast and easy landed you in purgatory? Be honest, that ice tumbling through your fridge door innards often emerges tasting not unlike thrice refrozen fish with just an ever so slight hint of tubing mold. In some fridges it gets so bad the ice can ruin a drink in seconds. On-board/in-board filtration seemed a welcome fix until we all experienced the dominance of food vapor as ice flavor – even in the best freezers there always seems to be that one little dish that ruins it for the rest of us.As a water and ice geek, I'm always on the lookout for better water and better ice. I'm currently settled on filtered alkaline water as my water. IT’S MINE. Wonderful. Detoxxing. The liquid equivalent of angelic seraphim from the inner dimensions of heaven itself, best drunk from a 16 oz Williams Sonoma Picardie Tumbler (first double-rinsed to remove dishwasher film at the molecular level). Yes, it’s geekdom gone mad and heaven too - right up to the point where you attempt to make the water in that glass: cold. Then you are thrown shocking, gasping, sputtering back, BACK to the dark ice ages!My first attempt at perfect ice water? Whiskey cubes! They’re stainless, they’re hip, they make you look dang cool! But…to keep my water lukewarm 24x7 I’d have to fill my freezer with approximately 764 metal cubes. What if an alien needed those cubes to reconstitute his spaceship and return to his home planet? Who am I to deny the little boy with the recently deceased mother from reconciling with his father by allowing my kitchen to be destroyed by 764 metal cubes flying every which way? Heck, the dang things never made the water cold anyway – at least not ICE COLD. I don’t know who put the whiskey drinkers and alien movie makers in cahoots but they can’t have my freezer space – I’ve got too much thrice refrozen fish in there!So I moved on to plastic trays. Cheap, quick, easy! (we’ve been here before.) Unfortunately ionized alkaline water is AGGRESSIVE. It’s MOLECULARLY UNSTABLE. It’s looking to BIND with something okay? Which is what makes it such a great detoxxer of the human body. Unfortunately it also tears plastic a new one (yes I said it). And soon enough, my glistening tumblers were filled with plastic-flavored water. Into the trash with $16.17 of cheap, quick, easy plastic ice trays and back to square one.Ideally the only thing that contains ionized, alkaline water is GLASS. And even then, regular cleaning with Apple Cider vinegar is required to occasionally remove scale build-up (the by-product of ionized water stabilizing itself over time). But GLASS doesn't work with ice – glass shatters when ice expands. So I dropped back to the next best material: Stainless Steel.I’ve had four of these ecozoi trays in service for about a month. Yes, I do get scale build-up on the stainless as well, but a quick Apple Cider vinegar soak cleans that right up. It’s likely a good way to clean these trays even if you’re just drinking plain filtered water. Just soak’em for about 30 minutes and they’ll come out smooth and silky and oh-so-shiny!Some tips: Only fill these trays three-quarters full, otherwise it's too hard to get the ice out. Wait at least ten minutes after taking these trays out of the freezer before attempting to 'pop' the ice out. When settling the handle back into place after filling - gentle, loving rocking motions are your friend (ahem) - don't force anything – the more out of whack you get the separaters the less likely it is you’ll get the handle all the way down – so don’t bend anything! Once you've got the handle all the way down, it's easy enough to stack these directly on one another - though it takes more care to do so than with plastic trays. (Yes, I have dumped water down my shirt during failed freezer loading attempts but it’s all part of the ballet of perfection – ice ballerinas aren’t made in a day okay?As for the strange wire thingees that come with this set? I was never able to get the ice trays to set on them levelly or stably - so I tossed them (in some future timeline Wall-E has probably got his little compactor door jammed on a now rusting, mangled version of these things – sorry Wall-E my lack of recycling acumen has become your fate!)Finally: ice storage. I took a stainless steel bowl, tossed it in the freezer and that seems to do the trick. It’s a little Shrekish, but I use my knife sharpener as a bludgeon, as the melty ice from my cracking sessions does often stick together on refreezing and that sharpener has just the right weight, pitch, yaw and attitude to separate it all back into relatively proper cubes.Warning: these trays represent a lifestyle change, if you are currently lazing in the fast lane of bad fridge ice, these trays will seem like a foray into third world living (can I say that? Ah well, too late!) - heck, let’s just lay it out here: these things turn you into an Ice Farmer okay? But for me, ionized alkaline water, combined with ionized, alkaline ice made using these stainless trays has created the best ice water drinking experience thus far in my life, and for me that makes all the effort worth it!Cheers cherubs!