What we love: The FastFreeze’s footprint is its biggest selling point. It’s a fraction of the size of its two competitors, making it enticing for anyone with limited counter and storage space. It makes half-pints of ice cream (whereas the Creami and the Chill both make full pints), which are optimal for solo ice cream enjoyers, and it’s the quietest and cheapest machine of the bunch by far. If you’re looking to hop on the Creami trend without shelling out the big bucks or giving up a ton of precious kitchen space, I can understand why you’d consider it—but it’s worth noting that it comes with some significant drawbacks when compared to its competitors.
What we’d leave: The FastFreeze sounds great on paper, but I was disappointed by its performance in testing. Did it transform frozen liquid into frozen treats? Yes, but neither the ice cream nor the sorbet I made reached a desirable consistency.
To operate the FastFreeze, you’ll need to press the power button and push down on the device until the blade has reached the bottom of the cup, and then repeat as needed. By the time my ice cream was fully processed, it was well past soft-serve consistency and started melting in minutes—plus it was quite lumpy. The sorbet (which I made by mashing fresh pineapple in the cup before freezing per Cuisinart’s instructions) was much more scoopable but took several minutes of manual processing to reach a somewhat creamy consistency, and never got completely smooth. This isn’t exactly surprising—the FastFreeze’s motor is far less powerful than that of the Creami or the Chill.
Because the blade can’t be detached from its base, the FastFreeze was the most difficult model to clean. You’ll have to carefully hand-wash this part, though you can dishwash the half-pint containers.
How I tested
To test the Ninja Creami, Nutribullet Chill, and Cuisinart FastFreeze, I made vanilla ice cream according to each manufacturer’s recipe. For the machines with a mix-in setting, I tested this by adding oat cookies to the fully processed ice cream. I also made pineapple sorbet, following each manufacturer’s instructions for making sorbet from fresh fruit. For the Creami, this meant adding pineapple chunks to the container and freezing it. The Chill instructed me to blend the fruit before freezing, and the FastFreeze had me mash the fruit inside the container.
What I looked for
I noted how intuitive each appliance was to use and how much effort each one required of the user. Two of the three machines needed nothing more than a button press; one required manual processing throughout.
Each machine offers a range of presets for different frozen treats. I especially valued models with a dedicated mix-ins setting and a re-spin option for pints that needed more processing time.
Storage and maneuverability
No one wants to have to store a huge, heavy appliance if they can avoid it, so I took into account each model’s size and weight. Ultimately, the largest and heaviest model produced the best ice cream and sorbet, but I made sure to consider the other models’ dimensions when writing them up.
Cleaning any appliance with a blade can be tricky, so I appreciated it when models were easy to disassemble and had dishwasher-safe components.
The models I tested ranged from $120 to $230, and price factored into my overall assessment.
The most important factor in my evaluation of these models was, of course, the quality of th frozen treats they produced. Was the ice cream creamy and scoopable? Were mix-ins properly distributed throughout the pint? Was the sorbet smooth and dense? I looked for models that delivered scoop shop-worthy results in both tests.
How do these machines differ from traditional ice cream makers?
There are two types of traditional ice cream makers: compressor and canister-style. Both of these work by churning an ice cream (or sorbet, or froyo) base in a freezing cold environment and feature a paddle that scrapes tiny ice crystals off the walls of the machine while aerating the mixture. The Creami, Chill, and FastFreeze work differently: A spinning blade pushes up and down through a cylinder of frozen liquid, shaving it into thin layers until it becomes smooth and homogenous. The process introduces less air than traditional churning, producing a denser, incredibly smooth result.