Review: Ninja Swirl by Creami Soft Serve Machine

The process of deciding what to make can be overwhelming (especially if you’re 7), so let me offer a few guiding principles. It’s not a blender, so it’s not designed to chop hard, loose ingredients, like ice cubes or straight frozen berries. Also, in our enthusiasm, we have done things like throw handfuls of soft, fresh ingredients into the ice cream as mix-ins. That affects the texture of the soft serve and makes it a bit more crumbly and less consistent, although my family insists that they don’t mind.

Overall, I would say don’t try to cheat and spin pints that aren’t fully frozen, because the texture will be uneven. Smaller pieces tend to get shredded while bigger pieces, like chocolate chips, stay intact. However, if you do screw up and don’t like the texture of something, you can usually fix it by pushing Re-Spin to make it smoother.

Photograph: Adrienne So

Have Fun With It

The classic tart yogurt is probably my greatest success—I can’t believe how much it matches the Pinkberry version. We also made chocolate and vanilla soft serve, both the advanced and easy versions, and mixed-in milkshakes.

I also experimented with several versions of Dole Whip. Ninja has its own carefully unbranded version called Tropical Fruit Whip that is a close approximation of what we ate in Hawaii; my husband liked a roughly eyeballed version of an Epicurious recipe. The Fruit Whip setting gave the dessert a much lighter and more airy texture than the frozen yogurt or soft serve settings. Overall, if you do follow the booklet recipes, Ninja’s recipes tend to err on the sweeter side. Frozen bananas and pineapple are plenty sweet without honey.

Ninja also offers a whole series of diet recipes, which are the advanced CreamiFit recipes. These use substitutions like protein powder and unsweetened almond milk in lieu of whole milk, or agave sugar in place of granulated sugar. People’s experimentation with these is what made the Creami internet famous several years ago. In Ninja’s booklet, if not on the internet, the CreamiFit recipes have more complicated flavors, where you might not be sure if it’s this particular brand of pistachio pudding mix that tastes like crap, or if this recipe is actually what tastes like crap.

My opinion on these recipes is moot, since telling anyone who eats diet ice cream that it doesn’t taste like real ice cream is like telling a longtime vegan that seitan satay doesn’t taste anything like meat. They don’t believe you, and they don’t really care anyway. So here we are—these recipes exist, and they work. I do, however, have to say that if you’re thinking about this, freezing regular flavored yogurt results in the same nutritional value and is cheaper and easier.

That’s the real fun of having the Swirl—not from trying to re-create recipes that are note-perfect but running off-the-cuff experiments on a Tuesday night when you’ve used up all the ingredients that you bought to test this thing and your sugar-addled children are just running around the house.

Chocolate milk? Sure. Lemonade sorbet? Go ahead! Every night, my kids warn me to make sure that there’s something in the freezer for them to make the next day after dinner. Say, hypothetically, that you forgot to freeze any ice cream before a 10-year-old’s sleepover party. Even just running to the store to pick up regular vanilla, waffle cones, and mix-ins was a hit. There’s just something about a soft-serve machine that makes almost anything feel like a special treat.

In several weeks, most of the mistakes that I’ve made with the Swirl have been user error—by thinking that you didn’t have to freeze it for the full 24 hours, or seriously overestimating my child’s desire for salty ice cream. Today we drove past the closest frozen yogurt shop—a 20-minute drive that we almost never make because we are a biking/walking family—and I rejoiced that I could now re-create its sweet treats at home in my house. For that reason alone, the Ninja Swirl is the best thing I’ve tested in months.