You Do, In Fact, Have To Hand It To The Ninja Creami

I do not want to give the Ninja Creami credit. It is not a handsome appliance; it’s built out of plastic, looks tacky and cheap, and generally feels like an unserious tool. However, it is also one of the most interesting pieces of consumer kitchen hardware to come along since the Instant Pot, a genuinely fascinating device that takes the mechanics of a high end $6000 machine and simplifies it to something that nobody can fuck up and basically anybody can buy. It is by far the most forgiving ice cream machine on the market, and is capable of creating frozen treats that should not exist. You do, in fact, have to hand it to the Ninja Creami.

Baby's First PacoJet

To understand why the Creami is weird you must first understand how a normal ice cream machine works. A traditional ice cream machine works by chilling the sides of a chamber, often but not always with something akin to a small refrigerator. The sides of the machine are cooled and arms (called a dasher) rotate to churn the poured ice cream base. The ice cream base then freezes against the walls of the machine and is scraped off by the dasher. The repeated freezing and scraping forms tiny ice crystals that then form the structure of the ice cream. 

The Creami works in an entirely different and frankly bizarre way. It is a simplified version of a machine called a PacoJet, an commercial kitchen product whose patent lapsed in 2017. You may be familiar with The PacoJet if you have ever seen the 2022 dark comedy The Menu, as it is an obsession of the character Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a high end restaurant groupie with too much time and money on his hands who does not actually know how to cook. A PacoJet is basically a big ass drill press that takes metal canisters full of ingredients and turns whatever is in them into a paste. It has many uses like making soup but is often used to make ice cream. You make a mixture, freeze it overnight, then put it in the PacoJet, and a spinning blade pulverizes the block of ice into ice cream. 

Ninja seized on the opportunity to knock it off when they legally could, simplifying the entire process and focusing exclusively on the ice cream part. Though not as powerful a machine, it costs less than $200 dollars instead of $6000. The resulting machine has many advantages over a traditional ice cream machine, the biggest one being sheer convenience. Because you are freezing the mixture in a refrigerator that you already own instead of buying a second tiny refrigerator (or in the case of the $60 Cuisinart Ice-21, freezing the bowl overnight), the footprint of the machine is far smaller. I have an immersion blender and so I’m able to bang out several batches at once in the pint containers themselves, freeze them, then toss them in the freezer for the next day. And because the mechanism by which the machine makes ice cream is inherently different, the ideal sweet spot for fat in mixtures is lower than in a traditional ice cream machine. It’s no wonder that diet freaks have come to love the Creami.

This is not to say that you can just throw whatever crap in a Creami pint and turn it into ice cream, though you’d be shocked at how well that produces something edible. A proper, well-crafted recipe will positively sing in that machine. In fact, learning how to properly make ice cream the traditional way will benefit you a lot in crafting your recipes, and it’s a fun skill to learn. Before I had the Creami I owned the Ferrari of consumer ice cream machines: the Lello 4080 Musso Lussino. I had gotten a deal on it second hand from a guy in midtown who had purchased it for his stalled protein ice cream startup. The Lello Musso is a beautiful machine: all steel, sleek Italian design, one of the most beautiful pieces of equipment I have ever owned. I loved learning to make ice cream on the Lello Musso because it taught me exactly how to make ice cream the right way.

Though it was a stunning machine, it was also huge, heavy, loud, and cumbersome, requiring a lot of prep work and time to churn. If you are making real ice cream to serve in a commercial setting, the Musso and its big brother are your first steps before you get into real kitchen equipment. But for the most part, it collected dust in my pantry because it’s a 38-pound mini fridge and was a huge pain in the ass to take out and put away. When my curiosity about the Creami got the better of me, my beautiful and correct girlfriend said, “if you get this thing you have to sell the other one,” and so with a heavy heart I sold my baby to a chef who lives down the street for exactly what I bought it for. I can see it behind the counter of his restaurant whenever I walk by.

I have been eyeing the Ninja Creami for several years now with morbid fascination, well before it blew up on everyone’s TikTok FYP. The thing that got me was that the close friend of mine who had taught me how to make ice cream years ago caved and got one. He was shocked at what he could get out of it for a fraction of the time investment. We both have a deep and unabiding love of weird food chemistry, trading notes on various weird gums and additives, and I think neither of us wanted to admit that something as corny, flimsy, and cheap as this could be everything it claimed to be.

Content warning: The following section discusses dieting culture. 

Food Chimeras

Over the years I have spent an inordinate amount of time fascinated with what I can only describe as “bodybuilder molecular gastronomy:” that weird kind of meal preparation that is more formulation than cooking and which creates something that can only charitably be described as food. It is a deeply American obsession to create a cruel mockery of a real dish using tricks, hacks, and cheats, trying to get as close to a real meal without including any of calorically dense or unhealthy elements that make it “taste good.” A similar impulse exists with vegans, although it reaches its apotheosis with lifting and gym culture specifically, the results of which you have probably seen on TikTok. If you ever want to see something unholy, look up the bodybuilding forum creation known as Protein Fluff, an ancient internet mixture of whey powder, diet soda and xanthan gum that looks like the imaginary meal the kids in the movie Hook ate that was just brightly-colored frosting.

Despite tasting objectively mediocre, I think the success of Halo Top really screwed a lot of people up. Ice cream is the holy grail for the food sensitive and fitness freaks because it tastes great but generally requires animal products, fat, and sugar to taste anywhere close to correct. Replacing those ingredients takes constant trial and error, precisely calculating and formulating based on tried and tested calculations. But the science has advanced light years in the last few decades, and vegan ice cream chemistry has gotten alarmingly good to the point of being on par if done well.

There are many recipes for the Ninja Creami that flat out suck. The ones in the included recipe book are less than great, and the formulations that are produced by an enthusiastic fitness guy telling you to dump a can of sliced pineapple in the pint canister are generally unserious. There are entire fields of food chemistry study devoted to this, and the most extensive book you can read on the topic is simply called Ice Cream, now in its eighth revision (two of the authors work at University of Wisconsin’s Food Science Department, known for its severely bangin’ ice cream shop). The Ice Cream Science blog from a while back has a good Tres Leches. Many of the recipes on the PacoJet website apply to the Creami, and they have many freakish molecular gastronomy recipes like Campari Sorbet, Mustard, Lassi (this one is VERY good), Porcini Mushroom, and Kale. Polar Ice Creamery has an entire playlist on YouTube I can recommend. There’s also a very dedicated and passionate subreddit around the machine. Jürgen Hermann, a prominent user on that subreddit, has attempted to organize a knowledge base around formulating recipes specific to the machine. It is worth noting this project makes extensive use of AI, both in its imagery and in how it uses a Google NotebookLM workspace to manage replacing ingredients. I personally prefer to craft my ice cream recipes through trial and error and assume that many other people feel similarly, but it’s still fascinating that something like that exists as a personal project around a weird ice cream machine you get at Costco. 

Over the years I have collected a ton of bizarre ingredients in my pantry in the pursuit of healthy treat science. Allulose is a big one, a rare form of sugar that doesn’t spike your blood sugar and is mostly undigested. It’s 70% as sweet as table sugar and if you eat too much of it you can get an upset tummy, but it works great in conjunction with other sweeteners. Because it’s sugar it forms ice crystals correctly, and it’s also a humectant, which is extremely useful in crafting ice cream. Tara gum is another big one, a thickening agent like guar and locust bean gum that imparts a creamy texture to whatever you put it in (although it needs to be heated to be properly activated). There’s also Quillaia extract and Yucca extract, which are both used in Sugar Free Slurpees and as foaming agents to give root beer that weirdly specific head it’s known for. I love nothing more than getting a package containing a baffling ingredient from Modernist Pantry that makes ice cream solidify at warm temperatures and melt when you cool it down.

After bringing the XL version of the Creami home from Costco, I banged out many different low sugar recipes, getting more daring and weird as I went on. The aforementioned Lassi was a delight. Cacio e pepe was alarming and tasty, a mild and sweet parmesan taste with an occasional peppery bite. White Monster Energy with fresh Strawberries (inspired by this post) was not bad. I had previously inherited a collection of food grade soda flavorings including Baja Blast from a friend after he had to stop vaping for health reasons. I keep them in two airtight containers in my pantry because opening it is like getting punched in the nose, but they proved extremely useful with the Creami. 

Once you get a base recipe down that you like, the sheer convenience of the device makes it easy to iterate, figure out where you fucked up and then modifying your recipe. The machine stores away far easier than my Lello Musso ever did, and in a few weeks I put more time into the Creami than I had with the Musso.

The Creami is not perfect. I miss the cold, mirrorlike steel of the Lello Musso, with its tactile analog timer that cranks exactly like an egg timer from the 1950s. I find the plastic design of the Creami tacky, a toylike design ethos that makes it feel like a disowned bastard of Dyson. I wish that the name of both the brand and the device, particularly when combined, did not make me shudder a little. I wish the Creami could handle what the PacoJet can handle. I wish the motor was just a bit more powerful, and that it had the indestructible heirloom feel of a Vitamix blender or a KitchenAid stand mixer. I wish it was easier to disassemble and deep clean, particularly around the piston. I would spend just a little more money for something a bit more serious, a little less embarrassing. But at its price, nothing is doing it like the Ninja Creami.

Since it became a viral hit, I have also seen several traditional outlets attempt to grapple with its popularity, and across the board all of the writing has the exact same begrudging and condescending tenor of a writer on assignment. They understand the machine’s relationship to the PacoJet and occasionally touch on the bizarre diet culture that surrounds it. They often follow the horrible recipes in the book, treat it identically to a normal ice cream machine, or downplay its cultural importance as a flash in the pan viral sensation. But while the relative virality of the device is what rocketed it to fame, much of the traditional media misunderstands the specific way in which the device is important. The Ninja Creami is not simply a weird ice cream machine, but rather the Costco-ificaiton of decades-old molecular gastronomy forum culture. It shares more in common with the Instant Pot or a sous vide culturally than older ice cream machines, allowing for specific styles of food preparation previously inaccessible to normal people. To misunderstand its purpose, its capabilities, or its fanbase is to fundamentally dismiss something actually noteworthy as simply some TikTok bullshit. Do not take the Ninja Creami lightly; it is not going away.