What’s The Best New Ice-Cream-Maker?
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I love my Ninja Creami, but when I learned about a couple of new ice-cream-makers, I was curious to give them a whirl. Nutribullet released the Chill this spring, its first ever in the category, and Cuisinart has a couple of models, including the FastFreeze. All three machines use a blade to whip a prefrozen mixture into the right consistency, unlike traditional ice-cream-makers, which use a freezer bowl or a built-in freezer compressor to churn the mixture into ice cream in about an hour or so. The blade method requires planning ahead — freezing the mixture 24 hours in advance — but the processing time is a matter of minutes.
Even though each machine varies in size, power, and output, I put the Ninja Creami Scoop & Swirl, Nutribullet Chill, and Cuisinart FastFreeze to the test by making a couple of simple concoctions: a basic vanilla ice cream and a tart frozen yogurt. My experiment was decidedly nonscientific, but there was no denying the results: These frozen treats were delicious.
Big but Powerful
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The Ninja Creami Scoop & Swirl Soft Serve Ice Cream Machine, which I’ve had for about a year and a half, is the souped-up version of the Ninja Creami and comes with an extruder for creating soft-serve ice cream and other swirlable treats. For the purposes of this story, I excluded its swirling abilities to put each machine on the same starting point. (TheNinja Creami Deluxe 11-in-1 Ice Cream Makeris its non-swirling counterpart.)
The obvious advantage of the Ninja is that it’s the largest and most powerful of the three I tested. It measures over 17 inches in height and 13 inches wide and is 22 pounds in weight. It’s a big hefty machine with a lot of power, which explains its price. It comes with 13 total programs for scoop and swirl options, including fruit whip, custard, protein ice cream, milkshake, sorbet, and frozen custard, but I mostly use the frozen yogurt and soft-serve modes.
Compact and Efficient
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It makes sense that Nutribullet finally came out with an ice-cream-maker, given itshigh-performance personal blenders. The Chill is a compact countertop machine whose base is much smaller than that of the Ninja. It includes five programs — ice cream, sorbet, gelato, smoothie bowl, and frozen yogurt — and is extremely easy to use. It looks a little like a Nutribullet personal blender in that you place the frozen pint upside down onto the base. I especially love how easy it is to clean. Everything (minus the base) comes apart and is top-rack dishwasher safe. Like the Ninja, it comes with two pint-size containers. Size-wise, it measures about 15 inches high, six inches wide, and ten inches deep, but without the pint attached, it’s pretty squat.
A (Half) Pint-Size Personal Machine
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This is the smallest, lightest, and cheapest of the three ice-cream machines I tested. This version comes with three half-pint containers, so it’s truly a personal-size ice cream maker. It’s shaped sort of like an immersion blender and almost functions that way, too. The size is also similar and measures a little over 16 inches high and four inches wide. Once your base is frozen, you attach the motor to the top of the pint, select one of five programs (ice cream, milkshake, slushy, sorbet, and mix-ins), and press down on the motor.
It’s the most compact, but I found it to be the most difficult to use of the three because it requires both hands: one to hold the base steady and the other to press down on the wand the whole time. It requires some guesswork in that it doesn’t stop processing on its own and instead blinks red when the blade has reached the bottom and it’s time to stop. It’s also a bit more difficult to wash, as the blade remains attached to the base, which cannot be submerged in water. To clean the blade, which is on a spring mechanism, you have to push it out of the body and rinse it under water, and I worry that I’m not getting all the residue out of there.
Comparing Recipes
A Vanilla-Ice-Cream Taste Test
To test the machines, I made an easy vanilla recipe that was included in each of the manuals. Each recipe was different, but I wanted to use a proprietary one to get the best results from each maker.
The Nutribullet and Cuisinart recipes were pretty similar. The Nutribullet recipe was a “vanilla bean gelato” that called for whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla extract. For the Cuisinart, I used the “simple vanilla ice cream” recipe that also called for the same exact ingredients (in different proportions). I accidentally made a soft serve recipe with the Ninja though now I realize I could have used an actual ice cream recipe that I overlooked at first because it had chocolate chips in it, or just the same one as the Nutribullet. The easy vanilla soft serve’s ingredients were sugar, vanilla instant pudding mix (I’m assuming for binding), whole milk, heavy cream, and vanilla extract. I put each mixture in my basement freezer for 24 hours, then processed them the next day.
Both the Ninja and Nutribullet whirred the frozen mixture for about the same time, between four and five minutes. Helpfully, the Ninja has a minute-by-minute countdown, while the Nutribullet does not, though it does have a digital progress ring. I accidentally pressed the ice-cream button for Nutribullet when I should have done gelato (since the recipe was for gelato), so I stopped after a minute and changed the setting. I left the Cuisinart half-pint out while I was making the first two ice creams, and it got a little softer than it should have, so processing that took only about two minutes.
Comparing all three final frozen treats, the Ninja produced the smoothest consistency (though that could be because I used a soft serve recipe rather than ice cream and I also put it through the extruder), the Nutribullet the second smoothest, and Cuisinart the third. Again, I admit that this wasn’t a scientific one-to-one testing, but for the first round, I was mostly getting a feel for how the machines worked.
A Frozen-Yogurt Texture Test
After familiarizing myself with all three ice-cream-makers, I decided to make my ultimate favorite treat: tart frozen yogurt. I wanted to test one recipe across all machines and used my go-to recipe from the extensive Ninja recipe book, which is just five ingredients — yogurt, buttermilk, lemon juice, and sugar. I chose this recipe because I’ve made it dozens of times on the Ninja and know what it should taste like and what the consistency should be, but also because the others didn’t include a plain frozen-yogurt recipe in their manuals.
A couple of notes: I already had a Ninja pint in the basement freezer from a couple of weeks ago, so it had the most time to harden. For the Nutribullet and Cuisinart, I was only able to freeze the yogurt mixtures for about 14 hours because I ran out of time (each machine recommends freezing for at least 24 hours), but it ended up not being a problem. The Ninja took four minutes to process, the Nutribullet five minutes, and the Cuisinart about four minutes as well. I had to respin the Ninja for another minute because it looked a little icy at first (there is a dedicated button for respinning). The Nutribullet and Cuisinart mixtures also looked a little crumbly and icy, but I let them be.
Unsurprisingly, the Ninja’s frozen yogurt was the smoothest (I didn’t put it through the extruder and scooped it out of the container instead), Nutribullet’s the second smoothest, and Cuisinart’s the third. Even though they varied in consistency, I would have been happy to eat any of them. And a simple swirl of the spoon in each bowl gave me the texture I desired.
Final thoughts
Each machine performed according to expectation based on size, price, and power. Going down the line from biggest to smallest, from most expensive to least expensive machine, the resulting ice cream went from great to very good, smoothest to a little less smooth.
The Ninja Creami Scoop and Swirl is a serious machine with serious capabilities.
I have only explored two or three of the 13 presets, so it’s probably too much machine for most people, if I’m being honest. It’s also big and bulky, understandably, given all its features — and incredibly loud. But the soft-serve extruder is extremely delightful and a great party trick. I also love the fact that it comes with a dedicated recipe booklet with over 30 recipes.
Most of the pieces are easy to clean and are dishwasher-safe. The hardest part to clean is the extruder, which isn’t removable (to my knowledge at least) and can get a little ice-cream residue on it. I use a damp cloth to get in there, but because there are a lot of crevices, I can’t seem to get it completely clean.
The Nutribullet is a great in-between machine.
It’s compact and streamlined and extremely intuitive to use. As mentioned above, it comes with five programs, which is more than enough for the average user. It’s not as loud as the Ninja but just as efficient, though the Ninja’s mixtures were always smoother. It comes with only five recipes but a QR code takes you to a website with seven pages of recipes, a total of over 80 recipes.
The smallest, most inexpensive ice-cream-maker? Consider the Cuisinart FastFreeze.
For $100, it’s a great option. The model I have comes with half-pint containers, though there are larger models that come with pint containers. As I mentioned above, it’s the most labor intensive because you have to hold the machine with both hands while it processes the mixture. But it’s not that loud and the final product is more than good enough. You can take everything apart and throw it into a drawer, which you can’t do with the other machines. If you’re tight on space and just want to be able to whip up a frozen treat you can scoop straight out of the container, this is your best bet.
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