Suddenly you realize you don’t have any ice on hand – whether a party is coming, you want to enjoy your sweet homemade ice tea as fast as possible or you just need to cool off, we’re here to show you a few ways to make ice at home without owning an ice cube machine, ice tray or store bought ice cube molds. Let’s begin!
- Can you make ice cubes without ice tray or molds?
- How to make ice cubes without tray – best ways
- What is the fastest way to make ice cubes?
- How to make ice cubes in large quantities?
- The verdict – best improvised ways to make ice at home
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Can you make ice cubes without ice tray or molds?
Making ice without an ice machine or any kind of ice trays or ice molds may seem hard but it really all boils down to finding fitting containers for the water to freeze in.
Whether or not your ice will be cube shaped of course depends on the container you’ll decide to freeze the water in.
You can certainly produce ice at home using one of the many containers you already have on hand. You can find a full list of these in the very next paragraph. Keep on reading, we’re about to share with you the very best ways to make improvised ice cubes in an ice-emergency kinda situation!
How to make ice cubes without tray – best ways
You need ice – and fast. And you’re all out of ice molds, ice trays and you don’t own an ice machine. Not good! Don’t fear however, it turns out there are quite a lot easy and simple ways to make improvised ice cubes without ice maker. Here are the things you can use instead of ice molds:
- Muffin trays – check if you don’t have any muffin trays on hand (silicone and metal will work perfectly). Pour some water into the forms and after putting the tray upright in the freezer you’ll be able to get a bit oversized ice cubes around 3 hours later.
- Silicon molds – just as metal molds and trays, molds made of silicone (such as cookie molds, muffin molds and such) can also be used to put water in them and shove them into the freezer.
- Ziplock bags – this one is a little bit different – you need to fill a small ziplock bag with water to around 1/5 or 1/4 its height and put it in the freezer. When you take it out in a few hours, you can use a kitchen utensil of your choice (or even a hammer) to break up the ice that’s formed inside the ziplock bag. Then you’ll be able to open the bag, remove your freshly made ice and use it.
- Flat shallow trays – flat and shallow metal trays can be also used. Don’t use wooden trays for this – they likely will get damaged by the water.
- Plastic tupperware – if you have any tupperware laying around unused, it might also help here. Find the smallest piece of tupperware you can find (a lid is optional), fill it with water to around 1/5 of its height. Put it in the freezer and after some time the water will be frozen. You can later try and break up the big piece of ice inside the tupperware into smaller ones.
Important for all of the above: With all these containers when the ice is ready you may have to heat them up with just a little bit of warm water to make the ice loosen and come out of the containers more easily. Just pour a small stream of hot/warm water on the bottom of each of these containers until you feel that the ice is loose enough to be removed with ease.
Of course, with many of these methods your ice “cubes” won’t be very cube-shaped at all. If you want to achieve almost perfect cubes of ice, you need to find improvised freezer-safe containers that will be able to hold the water in until it freezes inside your freezer.
In case of almost every method mentioned above, your ice should take around 4 hours to be fully frozen and ready to use. Note that the bigger the body of water you’re putting inside your freezer, the longer it will take to fully freeze. Check the paragraph below for more info on that!
If you want to go the easy way, you can always purchase some ice cube molds with fast delivery on Amazon instead of relying on improvised solutions.
What is the fastest way to make ice cubes?
How long does it take to make ice in a regular fridge freezer? In an average refrigerator’s freezer the water will take around 3 hours to completely freeze (note that in some cases it might take a bit more).
All the ways we mentioned before are equal in terms of their speed, as unfortunately you cannot influence the water freezing time in a regular commercial freezer by a lot.
The bottom line is that you should think about making ice around 4 hours before you’ll actually need it.
So, how to actually make ice faster? Making smaller ice cubes will actually make the freezing process a little bit faster.
For that you can check out mini ice trays – they’re really nifty if you’re often in a hurry to prepare your ice cubes on time.
How to make ice cubes in large quantities?
There are a few ways to make large amounts of ice quickly, but sadly there are not many improvised methods to do that. Here are some accessories that can help you with making a lot of ice in one go:
- Full sets of silicone ice molds – if you put a few of these inside your freezer you quickly produce a lot of ice, just make sure you have the space needed.
- Mini ice cube trays – smaller ice cube sizes = faster freezing and larger amounts of ice cubes!
- Multi-leveled ice cube trays – these are boxes that are easier to fit in your freezer than a few silicone ice trays, and can make even up to 64 ice cubes at the time.
You can click the links above to see the mentioned items over on Amazon!
The verdict – best improvised ways to make ice at home
So, what would be the best method to make ice at home without an ice maker or any ice-making accessories and equipment? One of the most efficient methods seems to be the ziplock bag method.
Although making ice in ziplock bags won’t give you ice “cubes” per se, with more bags you will be able to make large amounts of crushed and fragmented ice which will still be perfect to use with your cold drinks.
If you want more regularly shaped ice cubes, you might want to go with improvised ice molds such as muffin trays or silicone cookie molds you might already have on hand.
Either way, as you can see, there are quite a lot of ways to make ice at home if you don’t have an ice tray on hand. We hope we were able to help!
Main article photo: Racool_studio
