Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
A slushy without a trip to the servo? The Ninja Slushi makes it happen, though at $500, it may take a while to pay itself off.
Frozen treats are making a come back, and the name “Ninja” could be the reason why.
In recent years, we’ve seen this relative newcomer to the home appliance world challenge what you can do in the kitchen, bringing an assortment of blenders and food processing tech, and coming from a company that also covers vacuums, SharkNinja.
We’re not talking about sharks today, nor are we covering ninjas. There will be no sneak attacks from our writing. But we are covering something that may surprise in a good way: a slushy maker for the home.
What is the Ninja Slushi?
Every time you walk into a convenience store, petrol station, 7/11, or anything of the sort, particularly on a hot day, it’s hard not to spy the frozen drink maker with a bit of interest. You know the drinks are bad for you, and yet a frozen coke or Slurpee or slushy can taste so good.
It’s a great way to enjoy something iced and cold when it’s so hot. The problem is it’s not always easy to make at home.
In store and convenience shops, there’s often a specific contraption stirring the icy sweetened mixture or keeping everything frosty, but at home, you have to wrestle with options that are less than desirable.
You could freeze a bottle beforehand, but that only freezes it, and means you’re basically waiting for an ice block to defrost gradually. That’s not a slushy.
You could throw a beverage into a blender with ice cubes and let the blades do the work, but that adds water to the mixture, and may dilute the flavour entirely. That’s also not a slushy.
If what you want is a slushy, you need a gadget designed to freeze liquid, keep stirring it, and then dispense it at the front. The whole thing sounds a lot like an ice cream maker with a compressor, only with a tap or spigot at the front.
And that’s largely what the Ninja Slushi is: an appliance you can sit in your kitchen that uses an auger (read: plastic corkscrew) to spin liquid over a cooling cylinder that cools the liquid and makes ice beverages that are constantly stirred and turned.
What does it do?
Officially named the “Ninja Slushi Professional Frozen Drink Maker”, the idea is simple enough, with a large metal cooling cylinder connected to a compressor in the base of the appliance.
You’ll put a plastic corkscrew auger over the system, connected to a small rod coming out of the cylinder, and it will turn the auger inside of the cooling chamber for liquids.
Pour your liquid in, let the system cool it, and using a combination of sugar and water, you’ll be left with an icy mixture that’s softer than regular ice.
The important part here is actually sugar. Water is a clear part (pun intended), but without sugar, water just turns to ice and will possibly jam the machine. The sugar appears to do the job to keep the ice soft, though depending on your choice, alcohol could also help it along if you’re making a frozen cocktail, which the Slushi has a setting for, as well.
Five settings are found on the Ninja Slushi, which basically preset the freeze levels: slush, frozen cocktail, frappe, milkshake, and frozen juice. You can tweak it using up and down buttons, which changes the freeze level on the unit.
There’s also a rinse button which moves the liquid around the but keeps the freezing off, allowing you to clean the unit. Ish. We’ll get to that in a moment.
Does it do the job?
Turn the machine on using the switch at the back, and the compressor and its hardware spring to life, waiting for you to pour in your liquids and almost magically make them into frozen treats.
We’ve all seen these things work before, and SharkNinja (Ninja) isn’t doing anything remarkably different; you’re essentially getting an icy maker for your home, even if can take up some room on the counter.
Turn it on, pour your liquid in, and make sure you have enough sugar in your liquid, because that’s the crux of what keeps the drink from getting too frozen, it seems. A good amount of sugar bordering on a little more than expected will keep your bevvy frozen and tasty, so depending on the mixture, you might just want to give it a little bit more.
Testing with the classic Coke slushy, it meant that a lot of the sugary flavour of a cola slush felt subdued by comparison, and the ice on the default slushy setting was more like a soft snow cone, rather than an actual slushy.
It’s distinct to the Slurpee 7-Eleven sells, which is a carbonated slushy that’s pressurised. These aren’t quite the same, and you may need to add some extra cola and stir it around.
With that learning on board, pink creaming soda turned into a brighter iced beverage as we manually controlled the freezing button, jumping between settings of one and two as the slushy became colder and colder, and needed to be mixed better and better.
There are other things the Ninja Slushi works with, too. You can throw in some margarita mix or another cocktail, and also some alcohol to have it freeze the adult beverage. You can freeze juice and turn it into an iced slushy made of fruit.
You can even make a milkshake with dairy or plant-based (we chose almond), and mix it with condensed milk and flavours (or real fruit, which is what we did), and churn a milkshake.
Freezing soft drink to soft ice takes about 30-40 minutes, but a milkshake takes considerably longer, getting there around 45 to 65 minutes.
Sufficed to say, you may want to think about your drinks early, and then get the machine to do its thing, cooling and stirring and mixing in the background. You may find the kids complain loudly that it’s taking too long, at which point you can tell them it’s freezing and that takes time.
The good news is you can keep topping it up as time goes on, maxing out at 1.8 litres of beverage, but letting the system keep on cooling throughout the night.
For a party, that’s the difference you’ll need to keep the slush going, and is a lot more reliable than looking for a gem in a slush pile.
Is it easy to clean?
Clearly an important question when you’re talking about food, Ninja’s Slushi comes with a rinse cycle that basically has you swirl water around and release it through the tap. It’s a great way to clean sticky ingredients and residue from the cooling cylinder, and helps you to push water through the tap.
Once that’s done, you can take the entire water container and auger and even the cover for the tap, and start hand-washing it, scrubbing with suds and warm water, before rinsing as much off as possible.
We say “as much off” because it’s not always easy to get it all off. And you really need to give it a good go.
This isn’t a quick rinse situation. We tried that, and found that left-over residue from a Coke slushy at New Years actually made mould. Nothing surprised us more learning that incredibly small scants of soft drink produced mould, making for something you’d need to clean with a little more vigour.
The rinse cycle is handy, sure. But you still need to run it several times depending on the amount of texture and fibre your frozen drink ran. If it’s a soft drink, expect 1 or 2 cycles. If it’s a milkshake with fruit or something like it, maybe 2 or 3.
In short, you kind of need to factor in cleaning time for the Ninja Slushi, which is more than a simple “rinse”.
What does it need?
Beyond an easier clean, what it probably needs is better control, or even the ability to customise the settings.
Take the “Slush” mode, which appears as the first item you can press. That’s basically a mode to freeze as quickly as you can, turning soft drinks and other liquids into slushies. But we found the drinks would come out in frozen plops, rather than the smooth slushy texture you get from the local servo.
In fact, we found we either needed to control the slushy freeze level at points as it was churning, or add more liquid into the mixture a few minutes before pulling the tap.
That would get closer to a proper slushy soft ice beverage texture. Alternatively, you could add a bit of your liquid (Coke, for instance) to the ice once it’s poured and then stir, but this defeats the point a bit.
The issue is that the settings are perhaps too rigid, and could do with some control. While Ninja has gone for the Nespresso approach of one button push to make something easily, even Nespresso units can have their modes rewritten with settings changes. It’s more complex, but more control could make for a better slushy. It would certainly fit in line with this being a “Professional Frozen Drink Maker”.
Is it worth your money?
The other problem with the Ninja Slushi is perhaps the price, which can seem a little expensive for a fairly one-shot kind of gadget.
It makes slushies. It makes milkshakes. It makes frozen juice. And it does it all without chopping ice. But to get to this point, you need to spend $499, though you may find it for around $400 if you look.
That can be seen as a lot of money for something that largely does one thing.
Granted, specialty appliances like this tend to command high prices, and so we’re not going to mark it down too severely. It’s difficult to take the $500 price of the Ninja Slushi as problematic for only doing one type of thing when a compressor ice cream maker can command similar prices and also only does one thing.
But maybe it’s just us, there’s more room for ice cream than regular slushies. You can have ice cream year round, but you may not want frozen beverages in the colder seasons.
Of course, this can also do milkshakes and frappes and frozen adult beverages laced with alcohol, but so can blenders, and you probably already have one of those, as well. Even the Tefal Dolci can technically do slushies, albeit with a little more work, and it manages a less hefty price while still also covering ice cream and the like.
Yay or nay?
For its relatively high price, the Ninja Slushi is difficult to argue for unless you happen to have $500 burning a hole in your pocket that so desperately needs to be cooled down. This can definitely do that, but like pretty much every other specialist small home appliance, it gives you the ability to do something you couldn’t do before.
If you love slushies and don’t want to compromise on quality, the Ninja Slushi is as close as you’ll get to a frozen drink dispenser. At a party or a dinner party, it could just end up being the most popular gadget of the day. This is made for parties and built for summer.
But it is pricey and it is large, so if you are thinking of mixing things up with the Ninja Slushi, make sure you have the room, both financially and with cupboard space, because otherwise it’s taking up both.
