Transcription
This first hack is making apple pie ice cream using cottage cheese as the base. We're also going to be using another hack with the same recipe, so let's do them together. So for this cottage cheese apple pie ice cream, what we're going to do is add about half a cup of cottage cheese to our Ninja Creamy pint. We're just going to put it straight in there. Next, we're adding one small cup of unsweetened applesauce; this is about a quarter of a cup. You can use more, or you can use less. Next, I'm adding just a dash of cinnamon and then one scoop of vanilla bean protein from Just Ingredients. People are adding protein powder to just about everything in the Ninja Creamy; they're using protein drinks, protein powder—anything they can do to get more protein in. So this recipe has a ton of protein, both from the cottage cheese and from the protein powder. And just for fun, we're adding just a little bit of vanilla to give it a little bit more of an apple pie flavor. And then you have it all in your pint.
Now you know that you have to mix everything up in your your Ninja Creamy pint before you process it, and so there's lots of different ways you can do that. You can just do it in a bowl before you process it, or you can use an immersion blender, or like a frother, if it's powerful enough. But someone posted on the Ninja Creamy Facebook group that this hack was to put the whole Ninja Creamy pint, not frozen, into the Ninja Creamy and process it on the milkshake function. So then this kind of works as just like a blender, so then you only have to mix it in one container and you don't have to dirty anything else. So let's give it a try and see how it works. All right, we're going to put the Ninja Creamy in, press milkshake, and let's watch it blend. So far so good. Let's open it up and see how it looks. All right, as you can see, it's a little chunky still, and that's not the texture we're going for, so I am going to re-spin on the milkshake setting and let's see how it looks from there. Okay, this isn't completely perfectly smooth, but I want to try this hack, so we are going to just see how it goes. I'm going to freeze this in the freezer for 24 hours, make sure that it's on a level, flat surface, and let's go ahead and spin it.
Okay, let's process our cottage cheese creamy. This has cottage cheese, applesauce, cinnamon, protein powder. I mean, it smells okay. I'm kind of interested about the texture though. So throw it in and let's process it on light ice cream. This is what it looks like after one spin. I think I'm gonna add just a touch of milk and re-spin it. Oh, that looks really good. I'm gonna try the cottage cheese apple pie ice cream—I mean, the texture looks amazing. So let's see how it tastes. I'm a little nervous. [Music] It does taste like apple, and it does taste like cinnamon, but I'm gonna have a real hard time finishing that. I don't know. I think maybe my kids might like this. It tastes a little tart, and the texture seems like it would be good, but it's just a little off-putting. I mean, if you're a health nut, you'd probably like this because it tastes pretty healthy. So cottage cheese ice cream—I'm giving it like a C minus because it's not very good. But if you want to eat a lot of protein without a lot of sugar, this is the way to go. It's just not very good though.
This next hack was so pretty, I couldn't resist. So someone in the Ninja Creamy Facebook group, named Heather Mrs. Tucker Beck, she posted this amazing dragon fruit creamy that she made with two layers of flavor. Look how pretty that is, and I was super inspired, so I knew I had to try it. What she did was fill the bottom of her pint with mango, and then she added some coconut juice or coconut water, froze it, and then froze a top layer with dragon fruit, so there were two different colors frozen on top of each other. So I'd wanted to do the same thing. Let's go and try it. For my creamy creation inspired by this Facebook post, I wanted to do like a creamy berry lemonade. So what I did was I took my Ninja Creamy pint and I added about half of it full of frozen berry mix, and then I let those sit out for about 10-15 minutes to thaw just a little bit. And then I just covered barely with some lemonade until it covered the berries, and I added just a little dash of sweet condensed milk for some creaminess. I let this sit for just a couple seconds, and then I used my masher to mash these berries all together, because that's one of the rules of the creamy is you want to mash as much of like whole fruit as you can, so it doesn't break the appliance. After I got all those macerated, crushed up and into the lemonade, I wanted to freeze it. And I'm also going to do a second hack with this one in conjunction.
Someone posted on the Ninja Creamy Facebook page that something that is really prevalent in the Ninja Creamy world is that once you freeze a pint, sometimes you'll have like a little bump on the top of your frozen creamy. I don't know why it happens, but there's just a little bump, like a little nub, and you have to either shave it off, or you can just kind of scrape it off with a spoon, which is what I've been doing. However, someone posted on the Facebook group that if you freeze your pint without the lid, that that little nub will not happen. So I'm going to take my little berry lemonade creation, stick it in the freezer without the lid, and we'll see what happens. Before we add on the second layer to our creamy berry lemonade layered creamy, I just want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, HelloFresh. The best part about HelloFresh is that it is a top-to-bottom recipe for success. Each box comes with recipe cards that are full color; they have all the instructions on every single card, as well as ways that you can accommodate to any dietary restriction. This summer, HelloFresh is here to take the work out of eating well. Reach your goals with delicious, calorie-smart and protein-smart lunch and dinner options, plus new vegan recipes too. Do you also know that HelloFresh has a market with new snacks, meals and more to add on to your weekly order, like their full fun s'mores bundle for the kids? I think that would be such a fun thing to add to your package. The meals that we got in our box this week were the chicken sausage spaghetti bolognese was zucchini and Parmesan; it was so good for summer, just really fresh but light, and I almost have never used chicken sausage, so this was a really fun way to get introduced to it. Our favorite one, however, was the creamy dill pork tenderloin with couscous and green beans. I don't normally cook with couscous, because this was amazing, and we had so much fun making these meals. So thank you, HelloFresh. Our friends over at HelloFresh were so nice to give my readers an amazing deal, so go to hellofresh.com and use code TRIEDTESTED16 at checkout for 16 free meals plus free shipping. Again, that's hellofresh.com and use code TRIEDTESTED16 at checkout for 16 free meals plus free shipping.
All right, now let's go back and get that second layer on our creamy. The lid hack worked—this is kind of crazy. So I grabbed the pint from the freezer, and it was really flat. It has never been that flat before. I don't know what it was about not using the lid, but it totally froze completely flat, which is amazing. I think next time I might try and put like a little bit of Saran Wrap over it to see, because I just don't want any like flavors mixing in there, but so far so good. I'm gonna give it an A. Now we have this beautiful berry layer, and next I'm just going to do a straight lemonade flavor, so I'm just pouring some lemonade straight on top. It's mixing a little bit, but I think once it freezes and we process, we'll definitely get two distinct layers. So off to the freezer it goes again for the second time, and I'm going to just do the no-lid again. We'll see how it goes. Okay, it's a moment of truth. Look at this—that is so pretty, and you could put a level on that—that is so flat. So I'm super excited. I'm going to process this, and let's see if we get those two distinct layers. One more re-spin. [Music] This is the third re-spin, and my blade kinda was making weird sounds, so hopefully it's all right. Okay, it's still looking pretty crumbly. I'm gonna do it one more time, and we'll see. You can see that little crust on the outside. Okay, let's try one more re-spin, and if it still doesn't work, we'll add a little liquid. Oh, we're getting close. However, the um the color distinction is rapidly decreasing a little bit, so all right, let's keep spinning. Oh, I think we did it. Okay, it's pretty icy, and it's definitely one color. It's definitely one color; they just blended too much. I had to re-spin this like five times. It looks okay on the outside because this is like that crust from like what it looked like. Okay, so from the outside it looks pretty good; you know there's two layers, but this is what I was talking about earlier—this is like just frozen crust on the outside. If you look on the inside, it's all the same color. All right, so it took me like five re-spins for the strawberry lemonade to layer hack, and my machine started making really questionable noises. I hope it's not broken, but it does not sound good, and it's still just a little crumbly in my opinion, and it's one color. So I'm giving this hack um, a C minus, D, maybe an F, because it actually didn't work, but I don't know if that was user error or what the issue was, but for me, the two-layer creamy hack did not work. Let's give it a taste at least. Holy cow, that's tart, but that's actually delicious. Oh, that's so refreshing. Oh my, that's really good. Yeah, that's good. Okay, I'm gonna re-spin this maybe one more time, and this is delicious. So highly recommend the recipe; just mix everything together, don't worry about the two layers.
One last update: I added a little bit of heavy cream in the center because I wanted it a little bit more like a creamy berry lemonade, and I put it on re-spin, and it looks way better. This looks like what a creamy consistency is supposed to look like. Oh, look at that. Oh, yum. Okay, let's try it. [Applause] Okay, I'm gonna eat this whole thing. This is delicious. It tastes like a like a berry, a berry lemon sorbet, sherbet, like a sherbet float kind of. This is amazing. Okay, 10 out of 10 flavor, zero out of 10 technique. Now this is one of my absolute favorite Ninja Creamy hacks: it's making tart frozen yogurt. It's like the kind that you get at the yogurt shop; it's just really tart, fresh, yogurty tasting, and it is so easy to make at home. I didn't think it would taste the same as a yogurt shop, but it is so good, and it's so simple. So let's go ahead and make it. For this recipe, I'm going to just start out with a splash of milk just to kind of thin it out, and then I'm going to add some monk fruit sweetener. You can also use sugar, or you don't have to use any sugar at all, but if you want it to be like the yogurt shops, then you gotta add a little sweetness in here. So I like to do the liquid and the sweetener first, so I can just give it a little bit of a better chance to dissolve, so it's not grainy. Make sure you swirl it around really well, so then none of the sweetener ends up in these little divots. Next, I'm going to add some honey for flavor as well as sweetness. You can just kind of do this to taste. The best part about the Creamy is that you can just taste the milk after you're done making your creation, and then you can see if it needs to be adjusted before freezing. And when things freeze, they kind of lose a little bit of their sweetness, so you want to kind of overcompensate for that by adding a little extra sweetness. And mix that in. The first time I made this, I put the honey on top of the yogurt, and it mixed in a lot better. I didn't quite think it through this time, so I popped this in the microwave for just 10 seconds and warmed up the milk, and now it's nice and dissolved. So to this, I'm just going to fill it up with however much yogurt I want with plain tart Greek yogurt. I love the one from Costco; it's like the best value, has great flavor, such good yogurt, and the best price. Last time I made this, I ate like the entire pint, so I am making it full to the brim. Now we just mix this all the way up, and we'll freeze it for 24 hours.
Foreign ahead, and I spun the frozen yogurt. I spun it twice on the light ice cream setting, once just regular and then a re-spin, and this is what it looks like. It looks so good. Now I'll show you just how amazing [Music] Look at this. Okay, let's take a test, take a taste test. Oh my gosh, I could eat this entire pint. It's like perfectly sweet, but you got the tartness, and you can make it as tart as you want by just like adding less sugar or honey. What's really good with this one is if you drizzle some honey on top of it, the honey kind of hardens, and it becomes like this yummy like chewy caramel on top of the frozen yogurt. It is so good. This is my favorite Ninja Creamy creation so far. A plus. Thank you so much for testing those Ninja Creamy hacks with me; that was really, really fun. And again, thank you to HelloFresh for sponsoring this video. Make sure you watch this Ninja Creamy video next, and we'll see you on the next one. Bye.