The Ninja Slushi Will Make the Summery Frozen Drinks of Your Dreams
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The Good
- Smooth and consistent slushies
- One-press presets
- Easy to clean
- Easy to reassemble
- Can run constantly for up to 12 hours
The Bad- Commands a large amount of counterspace
- Heavy to lift and adjust
- Despite hacks, not a smart buy for sugar-free diets
Table of Contents
Slushies are undeniably fun, and have the extra benefit of cooling you down in the summer, but it’s usually really difficult to make an excellent slushie at home. Sure, you could blend up some ice and fruit, but those drinks rarely have a smooth texture—their uneven ice chunks will melt into a watery mess shortly after turning off the machine. But now, there seems to be a light at the end of the icy tunnel. The Ninja Slushi is a dedicated slushie-making machine, and it’s exactly what you need for epic parties this summer.
What is the Ninja Slushi?
Ninja has been supplying home kitchens with helpful appliances for over a decade now, and while the brand has become notable for cooking appliances (like my favorite portable air fryer, the Ninja Crispi), it's recently expanded from hot to cold. The popular Ninja Creami home ice cream maker popped up in 2021, and since then, the company has been unstoppable in the frozen dessert appliance game.
The Ninja Slushi is basically a smaller, cuter version of those big canister Slurpee machines you’ve seen at 7-Eleven, or the slushie machines you’ll catch behind the bars in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Don’t get me wrong, at 16.3 by 6.54 by 16.93 inches, it’s still one of the larger appliances you’ll have in your kitchen. However, at this pared down size, it manages to give a professional performance.
With five settings for different types of frozen drinks (slush, spiked slush, frappé, milkshake, and frozen juice) you can easily set this machine up for a variety of occasions, and it’ll be ready to dispense in an hour or less.
What sets this appliance apart?
Personally, I like how easy this machine is to use. I always want appliances to be simple, but typically I prepare myself for the worst—lots of prep work, a “catch” to look out for, or multiple steps while processing. The Slushi is truly simple to use. Add the liquid you want to slushify (which could literally be as easy as pouring in a jug of orange juice) to the port on top of the clear container and press your preset. The machine will immediately start up with a reasonable hum of activity and that’s that. Mostly. There are a couple things to look out for, and I’ll detail those in my trials below.
The slushies I made
This is a slushie machine, so keeping that in mind, you can make a variety of different drinks in this machine—from kid-friendly slushie juices to boozy adult frozen margaritas. The presets are temperature controls based on the type of liquids commonly used for that drink: A spiked slush will always have alcohol, so there’s a shift in temperature compared to a frappé, which has no alcohol and doesn't require an extra low temperature setting. However, you can always manually adjust the temperature with the up and down buttons on the right side if you want a different consistency.
Piña colada spiked slush
In my professional opinion, the piña colada is irrefutably the best frozen alcoholic drink. It’s creamy, sweet, tart, and requires few ingredients. While writing this review, I invited some friends over to celebrate a birthday, which seemed like the perfect opportunity for the Ninja Slushi to impress—and it did.
While I didn’t use one of the recipes from the recipe book that comes in the box, I kept in step with a pattern I noticed—it’s best to premix ingredients in a bowl when you’re not using a store bought mix, rather than dump them right into the Slushi. That's because, in case your drink has any solids like coconut fat, the machine won't mix them smoothly into your drink on its own. I poured a can of coconut milk, coconut cream, rum, and pineapple juice into a large bowl and went at it all with an immersion blender. I would have used a regular spoon or a whisk for any other mixture, but as it turns out, my coconut cream did have some pesky clumps of saturated coconut fat that I needed to obliterate.
That took about two minutes, and I proceeded to pour it all into the machine. The port is big enough to pour liquid into, and while I didn’t spill any, I do wish I had used a large measuring cup for better accuracy and sight lines. I pressed the on button followed by the spiked slush setting, and left the Slushi to do its proud business.
The machine has a minimum and maximum line on the front of the clear canister, so you can easily see when you have a workable amount of liquid. My mixture came to about 54 ounces and it started slushing after 30 minutes, which surprised me. The instructions advise you to allot an hour for the machine to finish, and while that may be the case for a full tank (64 ounces), my piña colada reached an ideal consistency by 45 minutes.
With an easy pull of the dispenser handle, my friends and I dispensed about 12 party-sized (four to six-ounce) frozen drinks over the course of the evening. The texture was excellent. There were no big icy flakes or chunks. Just a consistent, fine pour.
An oat milk and cold brew frappé
While a spiked slush fits in with a celebration, I don’t see myself whipping up 12 piña coladas on the average Tuesday. I decided a smaller batch of a nonalcoholic beverage would be next. While I did everything right with my piña colada, I did most things wrong with my cold brew frappé. And not entirely on purpose.
I wanted to see how necessary it was to premix the liquids if there wasn’t any chunky stuff involved, like coconut fat. Since I drink my coffee fairly plain, just coffee and nondairy milk, I decided a lazy technique would do. I poured each straight into the tank separately. I tilted the machine slightly to mix the contents, and while it wasn’t perfect, I figured the spiral spinning dasher inside would do the work for me. It did. Laziness wins sometimes.
I clicked the frappé button and busied myself with washing dishes, only to hear the machine shut off 10 minutes later. What a fail! I turned around and saw lights flashing on the temperature side, and that’s when I remembered: the low sugar alert. I never add sugar to my coffee, and so I didn’t add sugar to the mixture. While this might be fine in your mug, it turns out you can't (barring some hacks, which I'll discuss later) make a slushy drink without at least a small amount of sugar.
Time for some science: if there’s not enough sugar in your mixture, the water will start freezing into a giant sheet on the evaporator (the metal cylinder in the center that chills the liquid) and the ice crystals won’t break into a drinkable consistency. Sugar lowers the freezing point of water and allows the drink to maintain that sought after icy-meets-watery texture. I read about adding sugar in the manual, but promptly forgot all about it because I never think to sweeten my coffee.
The solution: add some sugar. But you can’t just pour it in; you have to dissolve the sugar into a liquid first (another reason to pre-mix in a bowl). So I poured a small amount of cold brew from the fridge into a measuring cup with a quarter cup of sugar. I microwaved the mixture for about 45 seconds and stirred it to dissolve the sugar. Then I added the syrup to the Slushi and restarted the frappè setting.
Again, the slush was finished rather early, since it only took about 35 minutes to become thick yet pourable. This one dispensed much more like a frozen dessert in the end, coming out in thick, rippling ribbons. While the slushie was tasty and I could see myself enjoying it in the summer, I was not in the mood for sweet coffee, and this would be a big problem for folks who keep sugar out of their diets.
One-ingredient frozen juice
I had some leftover pineapple juice from the spiked slushies I made, so while wrapping up this review, I decided to give the frozen juice setting a whirl. This might be the most realistic use for this machine in regards to sheer lack of effort on my end. There's no pre-mixing or even lazy mixing involved: Just pour the fruit juice right into the opening on the barrel.
Since fruit juices already contain plenty of natural sugars, you don't need to mess around with adding any syrups. As long as the juice has eight grams of sugar per cup, you can slush. I think the only fruit juice that might not have enough sugar in it naturally is tomato juice. But I'm not judging. If you want a pasta-flavored slushie, you just need to dissolve another teaspoon or so of sugar into each cup of the juice.
Once I clicked the frozen juice setting, the Ninja Slushi automatically set the temperature to one bar, the warmest temperature setting. It finished in about 10 minutes, surprisingly, but the pineapple juice was still very liquidy. It tasted like a little shaved ice was mixed into pineapple juice. I began to wonder if Ninja intended for frozen juice to be like this, but images in the included recipe book showed me that it should be thicker. So I bumped the temperature setting up to three bars and about 20 minutes later got the foamy, slushy consistency I preferred.
While the presets are there to help get you started, this is a good reminder that it's worth checking in on the machine now and again to see if you'd like your drink to be more icy or more liquid-y.
The upsides and downsides
If you’re following the rules with sugar and alcohol (they give you examples and guidelines in the instructional booklet), the Ninja Slushi makes excellent slushies. The unit is easy to operate, cleaning and reassembly is not a hassle at all, and you can make batches as small as 16 ounces. While that's not quite personal-sized, it's pretty close.
Sadly, the sugar thing bothers me—or I should say, the sweet thing. It’s not Ninja’s fault, of course. It’s just the nature of freezing a slushie so it stays drinkable and doesn’t become too icy. This is why all the slushies that you get at the movies or at bars are pretty darn sweet. While there are hacks out there (not technically recommended by Ninja, by the way) for using sugar free slushie mix, or adding allulose and maybe xanthan gum to artificially sweeten and thicken your unsweetened drinks like coffee, there’s not a solution for folks like me that like a slushie but don’t prefer the flavor of a very sweet drink. An edge of sweetness is just right for me, but you have to cross over into full-on sweet for this machine to work properly.
But beyond the uncontrollable, I find that the Ninja Slushi is also way too big and heavy for my kitchen. Considering it only makes slushies and not additional things like ice cream or soft serve, I simply can't dedicate the space to it. (Though the milkshake setting might scratch your itch for a cold, ice cream-like drink). Granted, I live in an NYC apartment, so I have to be smart about my counter space. If you have a big kitchen, then you can keep this in its own special place on the counter top, or at least in an accessible nearby storage closet. But for me, I just can't justify it.
Is this appliance for you?
If you’re a diehard slushie fan (you hold backyard picnics with tiki drinks, or you’re the slushie guy for block parties and cookouts throughout the summer), then you need this machine. It will absolutely change your world. I can already see your frozen margarita book club meetings becoming ten times more fabulous.
But I cannot see this being a good purchase for the casual slushie drinker—someone who drinks a slushie twice in one summer. If that sounds like you, stick with a classic margarita on the rocks. This appliance probably isn’t smart for a person with a small kitchen or limited storage space, either, nor a person with limited mobility, as it is doesn't have handles and is hefty and awkward to move around.
Finally, keep in mind that slushie drinks of all sorts will have some sugar or sugar-like substance in them, so if you’re keeping sugar or sweeteners out of your diet, then pass on this machine and stick to making iced drinks where you have more control over what goes inside.
