Ninja Creami Sorbet Recipes

Sorbet is the easiest thing a Creami makes, and the reason is sugar. A sorbet base is fruit, water and sugar with no fat and no protein, which should freeze into a solid block. Enough sugar lowers the freezing point so the block stays slightly soft at 0 F, and the Sorbet program shaves it into a fine, even texture in one pass. Our standard test sorbet, a can of mango in syrup blended smooth, came out with a texture score of 5 and zero re-spins on all five current models.

Canned fruit in syrup is the shortcut because the ratio is already right. For fresh fruit you have to add the sugar yourself, and the recipes here give the amount per pint, usually 1/4 to 1/3 cup for 16 oz of fruit purée depending on how sweet the fruit is. Short the sugar and the pint spins to snow; overshoot and it will not firm up. The base ratios page lists the sugar per cup of purée for the fruits we use most.

Texture varies more by fruit than by model. Mango, banana and peach carry enough fiber to give a creamy body, strawberry and raspberry are lighter and benefit from a tablespoon of corn syrup, and citrus needs the most sugar of all. Every recipe card states the fruit, the sugar, the program and the cycle time on the model it was tested on, with the 1.5x quantities for a 24 oz XL tub.

Tips for sorbet

• Start with canned fruit in syrup, not juice. The syrup is the sugar, and fruit in juice needed one re-spin where fruit in syrup needed none.
• Blend fresh fruit with its sugar until the sugar dissolves, then let the base sit 10 minutes and taste it. A sorbet base should taste slightly too sweet before freezing because cold dulls sweetness.
• Add 1 tablespoon of corn syrup or glucose per pint to berry sorbets. It stops the small ice crystals that berries tend to form.
• Freeze flat for 24 hours at 0 F with the lid on. A sorbet block is hard enough that a sloped top can stall the paddle for a moment before it bites.
• Run the Sorbet program, not Ice Cream. The same mango base came out slightly coarser on Ice Cream in our NC351 comparison.
• Serve within five minutes or lid and refreeze. With no fat, sorbet softens faster than any other category once it is spun.

Best model for sorbet

Any Creami makes excellent sorbet, so we pick the NC351 on cycle time, noise and pint size. Its Sorbet program ran 134 seconds in our test, 6 seconds faster than the NC301 and the quickest of the five, and the 82 dB reading is the quietest. Sorbet is usually made a pint at a time for one or two people, and the 16 oz pint gives four servings without leftovers that would need a refreeze. The NC351 review lists the sorbet result alongside the three other bases. If you want 6 servings per container, the NC501 and NC601 made an equally smooth sorbet in a 24 oz tub, and the NC501 adds the Italian Ice program for a coarser style.

The recipes hub links the other 13 categories. Italian ice and slushi recipes use the same fruit and sugar logic with more water, and the dairy-free category covers creamy plant bases.