Ninja CREAMi Ice Cream Maker review

Do you love having a sweet little treat at home? The Ninja CREAMi ice cream maker is a unique appliance that’s perfect for making creamy, delicious treats directly from frozen ingredients. Its treats, which vary from ice creams to açai bowls, are super customizable and are ready to eat immediately.

Keep reading to find out what I loved about the Ninja CREAMi, plus how it differs from traditional ice cream makers.

What’s in the box of the Ninja CREAMi?

In the box of the Ninja CREAMi, you’ll find the device’s motor base, a Creamerizer paddle, and two 16 ounce CREAMi pints with storage lids. You’ll also find an outer bowl and lid, as well as a recipe book. While the motor base of the CREAMi isn’t waterproof, its paddle, pints, lids, and bowl are dishwasher-safe for easy clean-up.

What does the Ninja CREAMi do?

The Ninja CREAMi is a pretty unique kitchen appliance. It makes ice cream, sorbet, and milkshakes, and more. The brand advertises it for ice cream, sorbet, gelato, milkshakes, smoothie bowls, lite ice cream, and mix-ins. You can also re-spin CREAMi treats to make them softer and creamier, and this appliance is very popular in workout communities. (You can freeze your protein shakes and creamify them before eating!)

How does the CREAMi work?

The Ninja CREAMi creates scoopable frozen treats—but, unlike most appliances in this category, it works backwards from frozen, solid pints. When you make a dessert, you start by freezing a dessert pint in advance. Then, when you want to enjoy a sweet treat at home, you use Ninja’s Creamify technology to break down the blocks into a rich, smooth texture.

Because you’re working backwards, the treat you end up with when using the CREAMi is creamier and colder than what you’d get out of a typical ice cream maker that’s churning from liquid to solid. There’s no intermediary step of re-freezing the treat you’ve just made before you can eat it. Additionally, because all of your ingredients begin the process from frozen, you can make creamy treats out of far more ingredients than you’d be limited to with a churn-style ice cream maker. You can make your treats from lighter liquids like almond milk, frozen fruits, and even protein shakes.

The CREAMi is essentially a super-high-powered, specific-use blender with no super-sharp edges. It has hearty dual-drive motors and breaks down frozen blocks with incredible speed, and it’s great at its job.

What can I make in the Ninja CREAMi?

The CREAMi is great at making all sorts of creamy treats, but I have a favourite few recipes—and so does the internet! Here are a few fan-favourites to try in your CREAMi if you’re looking for simple, easy recipes to check out.

Strawberry frozen yogurt: Fresh or frozen strawberries, plus plain greek yogurt. Add honey to sweeten. Freeze, then Creami on the Ice Cream setting. (I like to add a little vanilla extract or a tiny bit of vanilla bean paste to this, too.)

Easy strawberry frozen yogurt: Strawberry yogurt. Scoop, freeze, blend on the Ice Cream setting!

High-protein strawberry ice cream: Fresh or frozen strawberries, Skyr yogurt, and Fairlife milk. Add honey to taste. Freeze, then blend on the Ice Cream setting. Fun fact: Skyr yogurt is naturally low-lactose and Fairlife milk removes its naturally-occurring lactose in the ultrapasturization process. This is a lactose-intolerant-friendly treat!

Pineapple sorbet: 1 can (16 oz) of pineapple, including the liquid. Freeze and Creami on the Sorbet setting.

Chocolate protein Frosty: 2% Fairlife chocolate milk, 1 Tbsp chocolate pudding mix, 1 Tbsp cocoa powder. Freeze, then spin on the Ice cream or Lite Ice Cream setting. Fun fact: There’s 14 grams of protein in a cup of Fairlife milk! You can get that number even higher by switching to Fairlife Core Power Protein Shakes, which contain up to 42 grams of protein per bottle and creamerize like a dream.

Vanilla ice cream: 1 Tbsp cream cheese, 1/3 c sugar, 2 tsp vanilla extract, 1 c whole milk, 3/4 c heavy cream. Mix until fully blended (you may need to warm the cream cheese to do so), then freeze overnight. Creami on the Ice Cream setting.

My experience with the Ninja CREAMi ice cream, sorbet & milkshake maker

The Ninja CREAMi is fun in concept—and in practice! It’s super easy to use, with simple settings and hundreds of potential recipes.

I made some strawberry frozen yogurt and Fairlife chocolate milk ice cream for this review, which you can watch in my video review. Both were very easy to work with. To make a creamy treat, you freeze your ingredients the day or night before. Then, you just need to pop them out of the freezer, make sure they’re flat on top, and blend. Ice doesn’t always freeze evenly, especially when you’re dealing with multiple ingredients, so make sure to do that last step. The Creami is designed to blend only flat, frozen chunks—lumpy or tilted chunks can damage the Creamerizer paddle.

I really like that Ninja included an LED progress bar on this device, which lets you see just how close your treat is to being finished. (Each treat takes just a couple minutes to cream.) I made two recipes for this review that chilled for a full 24 hours in a very cold freezer, so my treats took closer to 10 minutes to being finished. When you’re working with a super-frozen recipe, your initial blend in the CREAMi is likely to be quite fluffy and dry; to fix this issue, you just need to re-spin the treat until it’s soft and creamy. I ended up spinning my frozen yogurt four times and my chocolate ice cream three times for the perfect, melty texture in each.

Treats for everyone

One of the things that I love about the CREAMi is how easy it makes making cold treats for specialized diets. I’m often in charge of desserts for big family dinners and it’s hard to find something in a store that can accommodate everyone! With the CREAMi, I can create a recipe that works for the whole family. For us, that means it’s egg-free (for my brother-in-law), nut-free (for my sister), and lactose-free (for me). Even just in the two recipes included here, I have one that’s nut-free and egg-free (the strawberry fro-yo) and one that’s very low lactose (the chocolate ice cream).

When we have company, the CREAMi makes it easy to make sure that recipes are also gluten-free and low in/free of sugar and sugar alcohols. (My best friend has Celiac disease and Chinese families have particularly high rates of both GI issues and diabetes… Every dinner party sure is an adventure!)

In conclusion

The Ninja CREAMi ice cream, sorbet & milkshake maker is really a fun way to make delicious treats at home. It’s a great small appliance to add to your kitchen if you’re trying to avoid certain ingredients and it’s excellent for maximizing your protein intake for the day. Unlike other at-home ice cream makers, the CREAMi makes treats that are super-cold and ready to eat immediately—plus, it saves your freezer space as there’s no outer ice block for you to pre-freeze.

Shop the Ninja CREAMi online today at Best Buy.