Desserts and frozen
Nutella Ice Cream for the Ninja Creami
A dense, gelato-style chocolate-hazelnut ice cream built around four things that keep a frozen dessert creamy rather than icy: fat, dissolved sugars, milk solids, and a whisper of stabilizer.
Contributed by Roger J. Greenwald
- Makes
- One Ninja Creami pint
- Time
- 15 minutes, plus 24 hours freezing
- Equipment
- Kitchen scale, immersion blender, Ninja Creami
Ingredients
- 170 g Whole milk
- 170 g Heavy cream
- 125–135 g Nutella (or similar chocolate-hazelnut spread)
- 27 g Agave syrup
- 20 g Light corn syrup
- 20 g Sweetened condensed milk
- 2 g Vanilla extract
- 0.5–1 g Fine salt
- 0.3–0.35 g Xanthan gum
Method
- Warm the Nutella, agave, corn syrup, and sweetened condensed milk together until loose and smooth.
- Add the milk, cream, vanilla, and salt.
- Blend with an immersion blender. Sprinkle in the xanthan gum while blending and keep running for 1–2 minutes so it disperses fully.
- Pour into the Ninja Creami pint and freeze solid, ideally 24 hours.
- Spin on the ice cream setting. If the result looks crumbly, add a splash of milk and re-spin.
The chemistry
It works because it balances the four things that make a frozen dairy dessert feel creamy rather than icy: fat, dissolved sugars, milk solids, and a tiny amount of stabilizer. The Ninja Creami then shears the fully frozen block into a fine, smooth texture.
Why it stays scoopable
Pure milk and cream frozen at freezer temperature would contain a lot of hard ice. In this base, the agave, corn syrup, the sugar already in Nutella, the lactose in dairy, and the sweetened condensed milk all dissolve in the water portion.
Those dissolved sugars lower the mixture’s freezing point, so not all the water freezes. What remains unfrozen is a concentrated, syrupy phase around very small ice crystals. That is what lets the Creami turn a hard puck into a dense, smooth dessert rather than snow-like shards. Sugar level and sugar type strongly affect hardness, ice formation, scoopability, and melt behavior.
Why the two syrups are useful
Agave and corn syrup are not redundant:
- Agave supplies most of the added sweetness and contributes to softness because it is predominantly fructose-based.
- Corn syrup contributes soluble solids and a viscous, chewy body without making the result taste as sweet as using only agave.
- The modest 20 g of sweetened condensed milk contributes sugar plus concentrated milk solids, giving a more dairy-forward, gelato-like texture.
Using several sweeteners is a formulation trick: their different molecular sizes and sweetness levels let you tune sweetness separately from softness and body.
Why it feels rich
The 1:1 milk-to-cream ratio is rich, and the Nutella adds still more fat from hazelnuts and cocoa-butter-like oils. Fat does not directly lower the freezing point the way dissolved sugar does, but it coats the palate, softens the perception of ice, and helps provide the dense, resistant body associated with premium ice cream and gelato. Milk fat also contributes to the physical structure of the frozen dessert.
The recipe spins dense rather than fluffy because the Creami process incorporates relatively little air compared with a traditional churned ice cream. That suits the rich, gelato-adjacent result this recipe is after.
Why the xanthan amount is tiny
At roughly 0.3–0.35 g in a 550–570 g mixture, the xanthan is around 0.05–0.06%. Its purpose is not to make a gel; it helps bind free water, raises viscosity slightly, and slows the formation or growth of large ice crystals. Stabilizers improve texture primarily by managing water movement and crystal growth, but too much makes ice cream gummy, heavy, or unpleasantly elastic.
What each ingredient does
| Ingredient | Main job |
|---|---|
| Whole milk (170 g) | Supplies water and milk proteins without making the base overwhelmingly rich. |
| Heavy cream (170 g) | Brings milk fat for fullness, a dense gelato-like body, and a smoother melt. |
| Nutella (125–135 g) | Adds chocolate-hazelnut flavor plus substantial fat, sugar, cocoa solids, and nut solids, so it thickens and enriches the base far beyond a plain vanilla mix. |
| Agave (27 g) | Sweetens and keeps some water from freezing solid, helping the pint spin rather than turn dry and powdery. |
| Corn syrup (20 g) | Adds body and softness with less perceived sweetness than the same weight of table sugar; syrups also help limit ice-crystal growth. |
| Sweetened condensed milk (20 g) | Concentrated dairy solids, sugar, and a little fat, helping the result taste milky, dense, and smooth. |
| Xanthan gum (0.3–0.35 g) | Thickens the liquid phase and slows water movement, limiting iciness and improving stability after a re-spin. |
| Vanilla and salt | Make the chocolate-hazelnut flavor taste rounder and less flat. |
Have a recipe with a story behind it? Email it to Steve Rosen at stephen.d.rosen@gmail.com and we will add it to the cookbook.