A friend who’s an accomplished pastry chef makes amazing ice cream. About once a week, she says, she eats homemade chocolate ice cream with a spoon right out of a pint container like a deer with a salt lick.

“Never ask someone who is eating ice cream straight from the carton how they’re doing,” she once told me.

If you make your own ice cream — and you certainly should — it ought to be terrific. If you make your own ice cream using a pro level ice cream machine, it will be the best ice cream ever.

So let’s start this weekend. The basic formula is simple: milk, cream, sugar and something deliciously flavorful like fruit or chocolate. Strawberries are in season, and peaches will soon arrive at their messy, dripping, blue-sky best. And, of course, dark chocolate is always in season.

The mechanics of ice-cream making are also simple: Make a liquid ice-cream base, chill it, then churn it in an ice cream maker until it thickens into a soft-serve. You can eat it immediately, or pop into the freezer to harden.

The ice cream machine that sits on our counter year-round is the Musso Pola 5030, a professional-grade appliance made in Italy. The Pola can produce 1.5 quarts of smooth and creamy ice cream, sorbet, gelato or frozen yogurt in just 11 minutes, without pre-freezing a bowl overnight, adding ice and salt, or hand cranking a paddle on a hot front porch. Other brands built for home use can take 30 or 40 minutes to freeze a batch; that longer time results in more ice crystals and less creamy desserts.

The Pola is easy to use, with just two buttons and a timer. Pour the ingredients into the stainless steel bowl, set the timer and press start. The Pola’s built-in freezer chills the bowl to -22 degrees and stops automatically when the time is up. The housing, bowl and paddle are all made of brushed and polished stainless steel, giving it a sleek, modern look. The ice creams it produces are world-class delicious.

There are a couple of hurdles. The Musso Pola ticks in around $1,200 and weighs nearly 70 pounds. Unlike the less costly units designed solely for home use, the Pola’s commercial-grade compressor can churn out batch after batch without pausing to catch its breath. If you are looking for a less expensive option that takes up less space, consider the Musso Lussino 4080; it’s similar to the Pola, with about two-thirds the capacity, and freezes a batch in about 20 minutes. It’s also less expensive, sliding in at $700.

Musso ice cream makers are not meant for everyone, but for those who are serious about happiness, either Musso is a worthwhile investment. The machines can produce smooth, creamy, perfect ice creams that rival those of professional ice cream parlors.