Don’t save it for the next heat wave, an ice-making machine is the coolest thing to have in your kitchen all year round. We try the CASO Clear Ice Advanced, a stylish maker of properly transparent ice.

Years ago, when visiting relatives in America, I was amazed at their icemaker built into the door of their giant fridge freezer. All you had to do was press a lever and a cascade of ice blocks fell out into your glass.

Back in the UK I’ve made do for years with a small ice cube tray jammed into the freezer. It works, but you don’t get many cubes and it takes hours to make some more.  I love the luxury of having a glass absolutely crammed with ice cubes, be it a G&T or a glass of water, and with an ice machine you can be as generous as you want. Especially in a heat wave

And the thing is, cocktails and soft drinks aside, having lots of ice cubes is handy for quickly chilling just-cooked veg to keep their vibrant colour, and of course for creating a super impressive shellfish platter.

Plus it’s the easiest way to fill an ice bucket for your wine.

The new CASO Clear Ice Advanced, which we’ve had on test on just the right weekend for it, creates clear ice in 12 minutes (or frosted in 8). Why is clear ice a bonus? Well it looks better in drinks of course, but it actually melts slower than standard ice so keeping drinks cold, whilst not diluting them.

Why are ice cubes usually cloudy? It’s down to physics. Trapped air bubbles get pushed to the middle by fast freezing causing a white core. There’s also some clouding from calcium in our hard water, we found.

The CASO ‘trick’ is that it freezes water from both the interior and the exterior at once, so the air bubbles can escape and leave the ice clear. You end up with cylindrical ice with a hollow centre from where the inside freezing element was located. This makes for rather elegant ice ‘bullets’.

The machine is a reasonable size for most counter tops, CASO does have a more compact version, but that doesn’t make clear ice. This model is matt black inside and out, with the transparent lid tinted dark so it looks smart and rather sexy.

It couldn’t be easier to use. Fill the 1.5ltr tank to the MAX mark – note to CASO, the MAX mark is black on black and I had to use my phone torch to see it, maybe make it a light colour?- choose regular or clear cubes and press Start

Turning it on produces a hum so quiet you have to strain to hear it (48dB), so that’s good. After the time has elapsed you hear a slight crunching noise, and then the first batch of ice rises from the bowels of the machine and gets dumped into the basket in front. This is not a large amount, we counted seven ‘bullets’ of ice, but the first batch seems always to be the smallest, perhaps because the machine is ‘warming up’.

The CASO then starts to make the next batch and will doggedly carry on doing so until the basket is full, or it runs out of water. The stats say it can make 320-350 g of ice per hour or 7.7-8.8 kg in 24 hours. Simple display lights tell you what’s happening.

If you need to drain the machine of water, when not using it for a while, there is a removable rubber plug underneath. It also has a self-cleaning function to purge any stale water.

You really do get a good lot of ice with each cycle. When we used the full 1.5 ltrs of water, we found we actually ended up with far too much ice for our immediate needs, so we filled up a few ziplock bags and put those in our freezer to be used as and when necessary. Worth noting that like all ice machines, the CASO is not a freezer itself and so the ice will melt if left in the basket for too long.

A CASO will be particularly indispensable for summer BBQs, delivering endless freshly made ice for everyone’s drink, while pre made stored bags of ice will be perfect for filling up ice buckets for wine or just to put in buckets to chill beers.