Soft Serve at Home? This $350 Kitchen Gadget Makes It Possible

Wall Street Journal

12-06-2025

Making soft serve at home hasn't, historically, worked out so well. Most countertop appliances are designed for hard ice cream. If you go Luddite and leave a carton of ice cream out to thaw just so, it easily ends up somewhere between a milkshake and soup.
So, when appliance maker Ninja released the Ninja Swirl by CREAMi Soft Serve & Ice Cream Machine ($350) earlier this year, I was—cautiously—hopeful. Would the quality of the soft serve make it worth laying out the money and the counter space?
First, you mix the base—largely milk, cream and sugar—in the provided pint container. (The Swirl comes with recipes.) Then you freeze it for 24 hours. The next day, you load the container into the machine, choose the soft-serve setting, and wait 4-5 minutes as a metal shaft with a toothy blade moves through the frozen base.
Next, move the pint container to the Swirl's top left corner and ready a cone or cup. Hold the lever down for about 10 seconds, and a piston pushes the ice cream through a star-shaped silicone tip similar to the kind that pipes frosting onto a cake. The ribbon of soft serve meanders down slowly, tantalizingly.
The ice cream will definitely be soft, but it can also be icy. My freezer was already set to zero degrees, but I learned that carving out a spot in the very back chilled the base faster, reduced the iciness and delivered a mouthfeel closer to commercial soft serve.
I also found that the base works better with eggs, and experts back me up on this. 'I add eggs when I make soft serve at home,' said Kimberly Bukowski, a dairy foods extension specialist at Cornell University and former ice-cream-shop owner. 'Eggs are a natural emulsifier, so you can use yolks without necessarily having to use any stabilizers.'
Adding a couple yolks did make for a richer consistency. You have to cook them first—for food safety and thickening—in a saucepan, to about 170 degrees. Ninja includes egg-based frozen-custard recipes in the book that comes with the Swirl. But this bit of fuss lengthened an already 24-hour-long endeavor.
The easier route: Use store-bought hard ice cream as your base. Commercial ice creams have stabilizers to ward off iciness and come in flavors and colors tricky to replicate in your kitchen. (I happen to love an artificially green mint chip.)
The machine is loud enough to make your kitchen sound like a wood shop. And it's big, with a 12-by-10-inch footprint. But it's also a twofer, since it churns scoopable ice cream too.
Most important, while the ribbon it produces isn't quite as fat as what you get at Mister Softee, it comes close. Turns out, it is pretty exciting to make soft serve at home.
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