If The Brave Little Toaster taught me anything, it’s that appliances aren’t always happy to be doing the tasks assigned to them. Take the newly-announced Ninja Swirl soft serve/hard serve ice cream maker. The center dial and two buttons for soft or hard ice cream makes a face that seems a little surprised to be churning your favorite ingredients into a tasty, cold treat.
The $350 Ninja Swirl by Creami is essentially the company’s existing CREAMi ice cream maker with the added capability of making McDonald’s-style soft serve without the risk of the machine being broken—again. The device can also generate frozen yoghurt, fruit swirls, and many other kinds of frozen treats. In any case, users will need to put their ingredients in the pot to whip it together before freezing it. The concoction then attaches to a paddle on the Swirl for churning.
That’s the same process as the company’s previous Creami, but to make it soft serve you’ll end up sticking the entire pint into the machine itself, where the Ninja Swirl then pumps out the smooth, cold goodness for users to swirl in whatever odd pattern they choose. The Swirl supports the company’s pint-sized containers, though not the 24 oz containers from the Creami XL.
The Swirl has a few other benefits over the $200 Creami. According to Engadget, the soft server/hard server device is supposed to be a little more quiet and it should be better at notifying users how much more time they need to wait before it’s done blending. It’s a larger unit overall from Ninja’s original 7-in-1 ice cream maker, but the added benefits for soft serve lovers are immeasurable.
What’s incredible is that there isn’t much competition for counter side soft serve machines. There are many examples of hard serve machines for under $500, such as Breville’s BCI600XL, but the closest example of single-purpose soft serve machines is from Cuisinart for $180. The next step up from that from companies like Vevor cost $1,000 MSRP on Amazon. Most home cooks don’t need anything nearly as expensive as that, especially if all you want is a pint of on-demand ice cream that won’t cost nearly as much as a small-sized Ben & Jerry “Cherry Garcia.”
Without forsaking your local small-town ice cream parlor, the Ninja Swirl may be your best bet for at-home treats. There’s only so many times you can hit up McDonald’s for a McFlurry only to learn that its machines are busted yet again. Companies like iFixit and other right-to-repair advocates requested DMCA exemptions to let more folk fix the fast food giant’s machines, allowing more people to get around that notorious physical DRM. Last November, feds finally instituted DMCA exemptions for “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.”
The only issue with the exemption, as explained by iFixit’s director of sustainability Elizabeth Chamberlain, is third parties still can’t distribute tools that would enable more people to fix those machines. There’s no guarantee McDonald’s soft serve machines are going to be any better now. In that vein, bougie foodies are still better off with an at-home ice cream maker.
The Ninja Swirl is available online now and should be on store shelves starting this spring.