There’s a Secret Ingredient to Making Luxury Ice at Home

If you don’t want to bother with cutting your own cubes, then Klaris has you covered. Klaris has labored to make a kitchen countertop version of the classic Clinebell machine, and we loved it. Trouble is, it costs a hard-to-swallow $550. Now, however, the company has created a new, cheaper version called the Klaris Mini, which retails at a much more palatable $300. The small 8 x 8 x 8-inch box produces two ultra-clear, 2-inch cubes at a time, which can then be stored away in your freezer if you’re stocking up before a party.

Nice Ice

Now, these methods effectively banish those pesky bubbles, but what about replicating that glacial purity in your homegrown luxury ice? It turns out there are three solutions here, and all are easily attainable at home—the last one remarkably so.

“Glacial ice is quite pure because it comes from rainwater,” Salzmann says, adding that the way to get cleaner water at home is to remove the ionic impurities (dissolved inorganic salts, minerals, and metals that carry a positive or negative charge, such as calcium, sodium, chloride, and sulfates). Salzmann says a water filter will remove much of the tap water impurities and pollutants, or you can use what Salzmann recommends: deionized water—”the kind you would use for doing the ironing.”

Clear choice: is this the best water for luxury home ice?

Photograph: Crystal Geyser

But we’re not done yet. Now you have to get rid of the gases in your water that will increase the chances of cloudy ice. To do this, boil your water first to force out any gas, then freeze it before it can reabsorb any more.

There’s a nasty problem with drinking too much very pure water. “Within your cells in your body, there’s a lot of water—but there’s also lots of other stuff, dissolved materials that exert osmotic pressure on your cell membranes,” Salzmann says. “If the medium surrounding your cells does not have the same content of dissolved materials, there’s a different osmotic pressure. So, the bottom line is, if you drink too much deionized or super-pure water, it would be quite bad for you.” Now, we should point out here that you’d have to drink an awful lot of this pure water to run into trouble—a few ice cubes won’t come anywhere near close to causing you any problems.

Still, we can swerve even this last potential pitfall by turning to the sage advice of Kevin Clinebell, grandson of Virgil, who now runs the family company with his brother Scott.

“I’ve got a customer in Las Vegas that studied [using water filters], because Las Vegas has very poor water,” Clinebell says. “Their dissolved solids are something to the tune of 450 parts per million, whereas here [in Colorado], it’s 45 to 48 parts per million,” adding that the system was also very inefficient. “So he started playing with different bottled waters—Fiji, Aquafina, all different types. The one that he found that was as close to perfect as you could get is Crystal Geyser bottled water. That one gave him the best results of any water that he’s ever tried, and he’s running reverse osmosis and everything else.”