Review: Ninja Swirl by Creami Soft Serve Machine

The worst part of this job is how often I find it necessary to make embarrassing personal disclosures, but here goes: My favorite treat of all time is a tiny, tart frozen yogurt topped with fresh strawberries and tiny mochi cubes. This was an easy treat to procure in the Great Frozen Yogurt Craze of 2015 (if you’re old enough, you will remember this as being similar to the Great Cupcake Craze of 2005), but it has gotten much harder to find—especially where I live in Portland, Oregon.

When I found the recipe for tart frozen yogurt in the Ninja recipe book, I squealed out loud and made my husband run to the store for buttermilk. It was so easy to make—just plain yogurt, sugar, buttermilk, and fresh lemon juice, whipped together in a bowl, then poured and frozen in the Ninja pint. After I put it in the freezer, I ran to my computer to order mini mochi on Amazon.

In five minutes (not counting the 24 hours I had to wait for it to freeze), I had it. The last time I had this dessert was in September, at the Pinkberry in the San Francisco airport. I can’t believe I can have it in my house now! Whenever I want!

Chop It Up

The Ninja Swirl is this year’s update to last year’s viral Ninja Creami, which is the in-home ice cream maker that is itself an in-home knockoff of the food industry ice cream machine called a Pacojet. If you would prefer to go straight to the source, you, too, could own a Pacojet for $7,000. You could also own your own industrial soft serve machine for $5,000!

If you go this route, more power to you, and please drop the name of your shop in the comments so that I can visit you. But the selection of in-home soft serve machines is a little limited. This context makes the Swirl’s $350 price tag seem a little more reasonable.

Like its predecessor, the Ninja Swirl works by lowering a chopping blade—what Ninja calls a Creamerizer Paddle—into a frozen pint of your favorite recipe to make it fluffy and creamy. However, the Swirl offers several more presets than the Creami; in addition to Ice Cream, CreamiFit, Sorbet, Gelato, Milkshake, Smoothie Bowl, Lite Ice Cream, and Mix-in, you can also pick Fruit Whip or Frozen Custard. Each has a different processing system that makes different recipes taste better, although truthfully I have screwed up pushing buttons many times and can’t always tell the difference.

It also does take up quite a bit of counter space—it’s about 15 inches wide and 10 inches deep, and it’s 17 inches high, so it won’t tuck away under the cupboards. It’s small enough to fit in a closet with the pizza peels and muffin tins, where I was planning on moving it. However, I mentioned in passing to my daughter that I would have to move it soon and that normal people cannot have a gigantic soft serve machine on the counter forever. She looked at me, puzzled. “Why not?” she asked. So there is that.

The operation is also remarkably easy, and parts are simple to keep together and to wash. It’s gotten to the point where my kids (7 and 10) can wash all the parts and accessories, reload the Swirl with a frozen pint, and run the machine all by themselves. The other day, I pressed the wrong setting, panicked, and turned off the machine to restart it—my 10-year-old calmly turned it back on and pressed Re-Spin to get me back on track.

Look It Up

Ninja includes a booklet with over 30 recipes, which we now need to have bound and laminated because it has been destroyed over the past two weeks. The recipes are organized from Easy to Intermediate to Advanced, and my family and I have worked through a half dozen of them.

It took a while, because my husband immediately caught on that the Swirl offers one easy hack—if your freezer tends to freeze pints of ice cream into rock-hard bricks, you can just dunk the cardboard pint into warm water, slide the ice cream into the Swirl pint, and put it into the machine. Bam! No more struggling with trying to scoop out tiny slivers of Haagen-Dazs. I've noticed that other reviewers have complained of the Creami's paddle struggling with harder pints. In around 20 times using this machine, I haven't noticed this. One possible remedy might be to not overfill the Swirl pint over the max fill line.

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.

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.