Review: Ninja Creami

On summer Sundays back when I was a kid, my folks would take me and my sister to Jenni's Ice Cream in Barrington, New Hampshire, if we'd been good that week. I had a crush on one of the scoopers, and I'd take it as a good sign if she remembered my “regular,” a small scoop of strawberry ice cream on a sugar cone.

Nothing ever happened with the ice cream girl, but I still have a soft spot for good ice cream, gelato—and my first favorite, sherbet. Making ice cream at home has always felt like an appliance too far, though, another giant stainless steel block taking up counter space. But a budding trend in home ice cream makers had me wondering if I should reconsider that stance.

The Ninja Creami [sic] looks a bit like a tall, skinny coffee maker. You make what you might call the liquid version of your ice cream, pour it into one of the machine's specialized pint containers, freeze it for 24 hours, then process it for about 90 seconds in the machine. The magic really happens in that last part, where a spinning blade descends into the ice cream like a little motorized ice auger, turning your solid block into a sweet, scoopable treat. Some food industry folks might say, "Heyyy … wait a second. That sounds just like a Pacojet knockoff.” I would say they're right.

More on that in a bit. But first, ice cream! I made a bunch, starting with the first of 30-plus offerings in the included recipe booklet: vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips. I combined a tablespoon of cream cheese with sugar, vanilla extract, heavy cream, and whole milk. A day of freezing time later, I pressed the Ice Cream button and watched the blades spin and whirl their way down to the bottom of the container. After that, I made a divot in the ice cream, poured in a quarter-cup of mini chocolate chips (Ninja calls these late-stage Blizzard-style additions “mix-ins”), hit the Mix-In button, and when that was done, I grabbed a spoon. It was good stuff. Pleasingly creamy, not icy, and with a bit of pliability visible on top of the pint in the form of swirly tracks from the spinning blade. The sweetness seemed about right, aligning with grocery-store ice cream.

Strawberry ice cream was a different animal, with mushed bits of chopped strawberries, macerated with sugar, corn syrup, and lemon juice before heavy cream was mixed in and the pint went into the freezer for a day. The finished ice cream came out really well. Not Jenni's, mind you, but not bad. I also saw something I'd see a few times in future batches where the final product had a bit of what the manual calls a “crumbly” texture. This can usually be solved or, at least solved enough, by following Ninja’s suggestion and running the machine one more time by hitting Re-Spin.

Next, I switched styles and tried Ninja's recipe for one-ingredient mango sorbet, where the one ingredient was canned mango chunks in their own juice, which went in the special pint container and into the freezer for 24 hours. I then spun it up into sorbet. I'll defer to my notes here which read: “Nope. More like compacted snow than sorbet.” The texture was wrong and a re-spin didn't save it.

Ninja's test kitchen team also seemed to forget about getting the finished product's sweetness level right. Preserved fruit like that is packaged at the ideal sweetness level for eating it straight out of the can, but freezing it dulls its flavor. In retrospect, it wasn't much of a surprise that the frozen canned-fruit sorbet needed sugar. Plus, different fruits come in different sweetnesses depending on manufacturers. A little hand-holding (or just more than one ingredient) would have kept disappointment at bay. It puzzled me that Ninja left so much to chance.

Photograph: Ninja

This also got me wondering about coming up with my own flavors. Nothing weird, mind you, but maybe take advantage of something seasonal or something not necessarily found at the corner store. Ninja really hedges both in the recipe booklet and the $17 cookbook for beginners that’s sold separately, mentioning that you can't use your favorite ice cream recipes, because the Creami “works differently than traditional ice-cream makers.” Then it really only makes a vague wave at helping you figure out how to DIY things. If the cookbook, which has a couple dozen recipes, came in the box instead of being a separate purchase, I'd grouse about this less. (For those like me looking for potentially warranty-voiding inspiration, check out the Pacojet entries in Modernist Cuisine, along with Pacojet's cookbook and website.)

Since I'm already complaining, I'll note here that the pint jar lids are stupidly hard to get on, even creating thin threads of plastic on the inside of the lid that could fall into your dessert, something I'd seen flagged in online reviews.

Photograph: Joe Ray

Photograph: Joe Ray

I plowed on, making Ninja’s recipe for vanilla-bean gelato using egg yolks, corn syrup, heavy cream, milk, and the ethereal-smelling seeds scraped from a vanilla pod, all heated on the stove to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, then frozen. Out of the machine the next day, it had a professional look, and the real vanilla made it sing. But if I were to go deep nitty-gritty, I'd say it had a bit of a clay-like texture and a chewiness I don't necessarily look for from my frozen treats. A bit of trial and error would eventually get me where I needed to go.

Next, I tried and failed to freestyle. I had a bee in my bonnet to make something fun with Campari, using the Creami’s orange sherbet recipe as a template. It called for a cup of orange juice, so I used half a cup of OJ and half a cup of Campari. My idea was to bring it to a dinner party, but that didn't work out at all; the boozy bitterness was overpowering, and the texture was more like a milkshake.

"Ingredients can really throw things out of whack," said Justin Cline, owner and head ice cream maker at Seattle's Full Tilt Ice Cream, whom I called to get a handle on how basic ingredients affect ice cream. He may have suppressed a chuckle when I told him about the Campari experiment, before sharing that they use a quarter cup of whiskey in their 5-gallon batches of whisky caramel ice cream.

"Water is really bad," he said, explaining that it creates ice crystals and can be hidden in other ingredients. He also reminded me that frozen-treat standbys like milk and cream are mostly water. "If it's just those, it's going to be an ice brick."

To keep the water content in check, Cline will even cook down strawberries to evaporate their water and concentrate the flavor. For Full Tilt's coffee ice cream, he uses freeze-dried coffee.

"Sugar is the most important ingredient," he countered, explaining that it raises the freezing temperature of water and slows the growth of ice crystals. “If you've ever had crunchy ice cream, it probably had big ice crystals in there.”

Egg yolk is a good stabilizer, meaning it prohibits ice crystal growth and thickens the texture of the final product. You'll also see plant-based stabilizers like guar gum or carob gum used to similar effect. I later learned that the tablespoon of cream cheese was the stabilizer in the vanilla with chocolate chips I'd made.

“Go easy with gelatin,” he warned about the occasional gelato ingredient. "It absorbs water, but it can create a solid and stretchy texture that's almost like Silly Putty."

Similarly, you want to be careful with oils you might find in ingredients like peanut butter, which he says, "can give you unpleasant buttery flakes in your ice cream."

After our talk, I took another stab at my Campari sorbet, this time using only a tablespoon of the liqueur and just shy of a cup of OJ—and hoo, boy, that was the ticket. It was sweet and bitter, cool, creamy, and dreamy—like an adult creamsicle. I'll certainly bring the next batch to a dinner party.

Photograph: Ninja

From there, I made Ninja's recipe for vegan coconut-vanilla ice cream with just unsweetened canned coconut milk, sugar, and vanilla extract. The end result, particularly the texture, was impressive, though some friends found it on the sweet side. Knowing what I learned from Cline, I imagined experimenting with various coconut-milk brands, different sugar amounts, and maybe a bit of plant-based stabilizer to keep it vegan.

After that, I made pistachio gelato, and while purists would call Ninja's recipe a cheat because it was pistachios mixed into ice cream flavored with almond extract, it may have been my favorite recipe. I used salted pistachios instead of the roasted nuts it called for, and that salt was a fantastic counterpoint to the sugar. I had similar success a couple of nights later at a family dinner making orange sherbet (a little crumbly but nobody cared) and cherry using whole canned cherries and almond-milk coffee creamer. Both went over big with the gang. A few nights later at another family dinner, when I had three pints of store-bought and a couple of leftover Creami flavors, everybody cleared out the homemade stuff before picking up the prepackaged pints.

My feelings about the Ninja Creami were not so unanimous. It's hard not to look at it as a cheap knockoff of the much, much pricier Pacojet, and a plasticky one at that. For instance, the blades are, let's say, surprisingly similar. (I asked a Pacojet US sales rep if there was any legal action pending, and he relayed the question to the company's Swiss HQ, then let me know they were unwilling to talk about it at this time.)

With regular use, I'd count every day the Creami lives beyond its one-year warranty a blessing. I'd also really like to see Ninja's test kitchen make more of an effort to help people understand how to come up with their own concoctions. Yes, the company talks a good game, saying you can “turn almost anything into ice cream” right on the website, but it never really walks you through it. Ninja could get away with this if the Creami worked using traditional home ice cream recipes, but as is, it feels a little too much like you're stuck in the Creami’s little ecosystem. There simply are not enough independent Creami cookbooks by trusted authors, and The Ninja Creami Cookbook for Beginners should not be something you shell out 17 clams for; it should come in the box.

This isn't an essential kitchen tool, but it's a fun one. Consider taking an honest moment to decide if this is really something you're going to use. I also don't think I'd buy this out of thriftiness; I did some napkin math, and that vanilla bean gelato (with cream, milk, eggs, and the bean itself) came out to around $7 for the pint, certainly not cheaper than grocery-store pints. I really enjoyed making ice cream while I had the Creami, but I also like the social and “special treat” aspect of walking over to Full Tilt on a summer Sunday, saying hello to the neighbors, and enjoying a scoop of strawberry in a sugar cone on a bench in the sun.