WIRED If you're into making pints of frozen treats at home, this does a nice job. TIRED It's a fairly shameless (and much cheaper) knockoff of a Pacojet—a machine often used in restaurants for making unique frozen desserts.
[sic] looks a bit like a tall, skinny coffee maker. You make what you might call the liquid version of your ice cream, pour it into one of the machine's specialized pint containers, freeze it for 24 hours, then process it for about 90 seconds in the machine. The magic really happens in that last part, where a spinning blade descends into the ice cream like a little motorized ice auger, turning your solid block into a sweet, scoopable treat.
More on that in a bit. But first, ice cream! I made a bunch, starting with the first of 30-plus offerings in the included recipe booklet: vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips. I combined a tablespoon of cream cheese with sugar, vanilla extract, heavy cream, and whole milk. A day of freezing time later, I pressed the Ice Cream button and watched the blades spin and whirl their way down to the bottom of the container.
Strawberry ice cream was a different animal, with mushed bits of chopped strawberries, macerated with sugar, corn syrup, and lemon juice before heavy cream was mixed in and the pint went into the freezer for a day. The finished ice cream came out really well. Not Jenni's, mind you, but not bad. I also saw something I'd see a few times in future batches where the final product had a bit of what the manual calls a “crumbly” texture.
Next, I switched styles and tried Ninja's recipe for one-ingredient mango sorbet, where the one ingredient was canned mango chunks in their own juice, which went in the special pint container and into the freezer for 24 hours. I then spun it up into sorbet. I'll defer to my notes here which read: “Nope. More like compacted snow than sorbet.” The texture was wrong and a re-spin didn't save it.
Ninja's test kitchen team also seemed to forget about getting the finished product's sweetness level right. Preserved fruit like that is packaged at the ideal sweetness level for eating it straight out of the can, but freezing it dulls its flavor. In retrospect, it wasn't much of a surprise that the frozen canned-fruit sorbet needed sugar. Plus, different fruits come in different sweetnesses depending on manufacturers. A little hand-holding would have kept disappointment at bay.
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