I started making my own ice cream this year. While the French type works quite well, I've been having trouble with American and Gelato types.   I don't have an ice cream machine. I freeze small portions of icecream on a prefrozen wide porcelain plate. While a pinch of xanthan keeps the result reasonably smooth, the texture isn't great. It melts almost instantly, and when melted, it is as liquid as it was before - it turns to sweetened milk in my mouth even before I have swallowed it.   So while I prefer denser ice cream, I think that some recipes were created with a lot of overrun in mind. I thought of trying the Serious eats idea and creating the overrun after the freezing. But first, I don't have a food processor, and don't think an immersion blender will be good enough. Second, it will melt while I am blending.   I don't want to pay the money and simply don't have the space for a gelateria style ice cream machine with a compressor. I was wondering if the prefrozen churner type machines will help with my problem.    How much overrun do they produce with a typical ice cream recipe (say 2/3 3.6%, 1/3 30% cream)?  Does the texture suffer from the same problems (instant melting)?    Edit  Overrun is measured in percent. If 500 ml of mixture go into the machine and out come 750 ml of ice cream, this is 50% overrun (the air volume in the ice cream is 50% of the ice cream base volume).  
Cooks Illustrated reviewed and measured overrun in a bunch of ice cream makers: http://www.cooksillustrated.com/equipment/results.asp?docid=25989  Most were 20–30%, with the exception of one that attached to a stand mixer, which had an astonishing 80%, and one which completely failed (3%). Most are compressorless models costing under $100.  So, if you're going for around for 20-30%, a pre-frozen churner can do that.  (Note: you have to pull up the details of each model to see the overrun percentage, it's not in the recommendation summary table). 