Ninja Slushi Frozen Drink Maker FS301UK

Design and Features

• Sturdy design
• Temperature control
• Six pre-set programs

The Ninja Slushi is a sturdy machine that will take up a fair amount of room on your kitchen counter. It’s also quite heavy, so isn’t easy to move around for storing away. At this size, it feels like the kind of device that you really need to use a lot to warrant the amount of space it takes up.

As this is a Ninja product, it does more than just make standard slushies, and has preset buttons for making slush, frozen cocktails, frappe, milkshake and frozen juice.

Each mode is selectable via the mode button on the front, which sets the Slushi to a preset cold level. However, you can override this using the temperature dial on the front, which is handy. In testing, I found that some drinks were a little too frozen at the default settings, so it was handy to be able to dial the temperature back a little.

Liquid has to poured into the see-through vessel at the top, which has minimum (475ml) and maximum (1890ml) fill marks. Some ingredients can be poured straight in, such as fresh fruit juice, but if you’re making other drinks, such as frozen cocktails, you need to get the right ratio of ingredients.

Ninja’s helpful instruction manual tells you which ratios to use, and also has example recipes to get you started.

There are some things to watch out for. With regular drinks, you need a suitable amount of sugar, which is a minimum of 5g per 100ml. If your drink is below this, you can add one to two tablespoons of flavoured syrup, sugar, date sugar, coconut sugar, maple syrup, agave, sugar syrup or honey per serving.

You do have to be careful what you add. With some SodaStream Pepsi Max Cherry, the sugar content is too low, but adding sugar directly to the carbonated version of the drink causes it to explosively fizz-up. Making a flat version of the drink with added honey did work, but Ninja suggests adding erythritol, lemon juice and salt to diet drinks. An artificial sweetener, erythritol, tastes like sugar and is readily available in supermarkets.

If low sugar is detected, the Slushi beeps and the control LEDs flash in descending order, telling you that you need to add more sugar.

When using alcohol, the total liquid must contain between 2.8% and 16% alcohol. If the alcohol level is too high, you also get an alert and should dilute the mixture.

Getting the right mixtures can take a bit of experimentation, but follow the clear instructions and mixing guide that’s provided with the Slushi and it’s generally easy to get things right.

Once liquid has been added, the Slushi works by itself. The blue plastic screw mixes the liquid, and turns it around the evaporator in the middle, which cools and freezes your drink. It’s easy to keep an eye on drinks as they freeze, and the temperature LEDs on the right count up to the set level, with the machine beeping when the temperature has been reached.

It’s worth keeping a visual eye on the process, as you may want to select a different temperature if your drink is looking too watery or too frozen.

Once your drink’s at the right level, which typically takes around 30 minutes, but can take up to one hours, the Slushi holds the drink at that temperature, so you can pour a new drink when you like, by pulling the handle at the front. The first glass can take a little while to start pouring, but I found that subsequent pourings were quicker.

At the end, you should dispense any remaining drink, turn the machine off. Then, fill it with warm water and put it on the rinse cycle, until all traces of mess are removed from the evaporator, and dispense the water into a jug.

The plastic case and screw come off, as does the pull-out drip tray. These can be put in the dishwasher or washed by hand. The evaporator and outside of the machine should be wiped down with a damp cloth.

Performance

• Brilliant slushies
• Wide range of drinks available
• Not all drinks are better off frozen

I made a range of different slushies with the machine, and had an expert panel of taste testers on hand at my daughter’s 13^th birthday party. The teens’ verdict: top-quality slushie, and they loved being able to make the different flavours themselves.

They had a Pepsi Max Cherry slushie (with added honey for the right sugar level), which came out at just the right consistency. Likewise, the tropical fruit juice produced an excellent slushie with no added ingredients required.

Now onto drinks for the adults. The manual features a range of different frozen cocktail recipes, a mix of traditional like a pina colada or margarita, to some more novel ideas like a frozen Pimm’s. I tried out a pina colada, and made up the one-to-three servings amount, which requires 120ml of alcohol (rum in this case) and 590ml of mixer (pineapple juice and coconut milk). Ninja also has instructions to make more servings.

According to the manual, frozen cocktails should reach level nine to be at perfect temperature for the alcohol-based drinks. But this took a long time when I tested it, and at 50 minutes it had only reached level seven, so I turned down the dial to a lower temperature setting. That did the trick; the machine beeped straight away, and the drink was ready to sample. 

My pina colada was a very delicate lemon colour, and the consistency looked extremely impressive. But the taste was a bit odd to get used to, as it was a very frozen pina colada as opposed to the standard smoothie-consistency pina colada that I’d expect to be served up at some exotic beach resort.

The cocktail certainly had a kick to it, and tasted very alcoholic, but it wasn’t as nice as a traditional pina colada.

I then made a gin and lemonade cocktail, with added raspberry flavour. This was designed to be a frozen cocktail and worked much better than the pina colada. Choice of drink is everything, and some drinks work better as a frozen variant than others.

Should you buy it?