Ninja Creami (2022): freeze the pint solid, then shave it into ice cream

Traditional home ice-cream machines churn the base while freezing it: chilled walls, a rotating dasher, tiny ice crystals scraped off as they form. That couples texture to the recipe's fat and sugar, which is why 'healthy' homemade ice cream so often fails. Ninja's Creami, retailing around $199 when Wired reviewed it in April 2022, works the opposite way — it first freezes the base into a solid block, then turns the block into ice cream with a spinning blade.

The trick, Wired noted, is essentially a cheap PacoJet: the restaurant machine that shaves frozen canisters into silky ice cream and costs about $6,000. Aftermath later reported the PacoJet's patent lapsed in 2017, leaving the technique legally free to copy, and judged that Ninja 'seized on the opportunity to knock it off when they legally could' — simplifying the mechanism into a plasticky $200 appliance almost anyone can operate.

The payoff is convenience plus freedom. The pint canisters freeze in a refrigerator the user already owns — no frozen bowls, no built-in cooler — so the machine is small and several batches can be staged at once. And because the auger blade creates the texture mechanically, the ideal fat content sits lower than in a churner, 'and it's no wonder that diet freaks have come to love the Creami' as protein-ice-cream recipes became a TikTok genre.

Aftermath, which began as skeptical as anyone, concluded 'there is nothing like it at its price point' and called the machine 'the Costco-ification of decades-old molecular gastronomy forum culture'. Rival frozen-dessert machines from Cuisinart, NutriBullet and supermarket own-brands followed the same freeze-and-shave approach.