As soon as I discovered Cuisinart's Fast Freeze ice cream maker, I've been dying to try it. I'm obsessed with my Ninja Creami, but this Cuisinart dupe is only $119 / £99, and takes up a lot less counter space.
The Fast Freeze is called the Freeze Wand in the U.K., and I think that's a much better name. There's nothing fast about it: you need to freeze your mixture overnight, just like you do with the Ninja Creami. However, it does perform a lot like a magic wand, turning your frozen mixtures into tasty desserts in minutes.
Best of all, this handheld ice cream maker comes with much smaller containers, which is a blessing for my over-filled freezer and penchant for single-serve frozen treats.
But after my first time using the Fast Freeze, I'm more than a little shocked by how easily it sliced through my frozen chocolate milk to make tasty, zero-effort ice cream. Here's how my first impressions went.
Getting hands-on with the Fast Freeze
The FastFreeze has a spinning blade that slices through your frozen mix as you push the top of the wand down. It works a bit like an AeroPress, using your manual pressure to plunge down the blending compartment.
I pre-froze three mixtures for my test: a tropical fruit just to make a slushie, a strawberry yogurt to make fro-yo, and a low-fat chocolate milk to make a healthier alternative to gelato.
For my first impressions, I decided to start with my chocolate milk mixture, which couldn't have been easier to prepare.
Churning my ice cream
You can choose between five settings on the blending wand before you churn your ice cream mix. You can twist the dial to switch between these settings, then press the 'Play' button, and gently press down the wand mechanism to process your mix.
Given how much noise my Ninja Creami kicks up when it's churning ice cream, I was expecting this to be a lot more noisy, and scary, than it really was. I thought I must've done something wrong when my wand's light turned red, but it turns out that just means you've finished blending. It took around a minute and made only a small fraction of the noise the Ninja Creami makes!
I was left with a cup of fully-churned ice cream. It looked a little grainy at first, which is largely on account of the low fat content of the milk as opposed to a fault of the FastFreeze, and once I gave it a good stir it came together in a thick, scoopable texture.
The half-pint cup (you can't fill to the top, so it doesn't leave you with half a pint of ice cream) was ideal for a single serving. But because the ice cream maker comes with three cups, you might find it's not ideal for catering to a crowd.
I can't see an option to buy more cups online, which feels like an oversight from Cuisinart, but hopefully they'll release some soon in order to allow customers to prep plenty of treats far in advance.
The taste-test
I'll be prepping a proper gelato recipe from Cuisinart's own recipe book to really put this ice cream maker through its paces, but like I said, the low-fat chocolate milk did result in a more frosty consistency that needed some mixing to form a scoopable texture.
However, once I served a scoop to my partner, he assumed I'd made it in the Ninja Creami, which felt like a real win considering how much more expensive the Creami is than the FastFreeze.
Aside from a tiny bit of crystallization around the exterior of the cup, the ice cream was super smooth and didn't have any lumps. It was super tasty, so from my first impression there's no obvious trade-offs if you opt for the Cuisinart over a Ninja machine. If anything, the reduced noise and size requirements could make it a much more tempting option for the average user.
I'll be writing my complete review, as well as a side-by-side comparison with my Ninja Creami, in the weeks to come. But if first impressions are anything to go by, the FastFreeze could be a real game-changer.
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