Lite Vanilla Ice Cream Ninja Creami

This is the classic Vanilla Ice cream recipe in the Ninja Creami product book, but with healthy substitutions to lighten it up and lower the calories.

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Not all Ninja Creami recipes have to be made with protein! Although, that’s my favorite way to use my Creami. But, sometimes, a recipe can just be Ice Cream, made lighter! This is my modification of the Ninja Creami vanilla recipe, with substitutions to make it “Lite”.

With my healthy substitutions, you’ll save 1128 calories for the ENTIRE recipe, and I guarantee it tastes just as good.

One serving of the lightened up version of Vanilla ice cream is 1/4 of the recipe for

• Calories: 109cal 
• Carbohydrates: 22g
• Protein: 4g
• Fat: 8g 
• Sugar: 6g

The classic Ninja Creami recipe contains: (for 1/4 of the recipe): 404 calories!! 32 g carbs, 5 g protein, 29 g fat, and 32 g sugar.

WOW! What a savings!

The ingredients:

There are only 5 ingredients in the original Vanilla Ice Cream from the Ninja Creami people. This doesn’t include the chocolate chips which they add at the bottom, and I’m not sure why. Who likes chocolate chips in their ice cream? I find them problematic because frozen chocolate chips are so hard to crunch. I much prefer flavorings that are more like caramel sauce or whipped cream. Heck, even chocolate sauce would be ok. But chocolate chips are just weird.

Anyway, with that caveat, the 5 ingredients are:

• Cream cheese: In the Vanilla ice cream recipe they start with cream cheese. Interesting choice, as I’ve never seen a list of ice cream ingredients that had this. Nonetheless, I left the cream cheese in, but I used reduced fat cream cheese. I truly think this not only acts just like the full fat cream cheese, but it tastes as close to it as you can get. I’d opt for fat free cream cheese, but it’s a RARE day that I find the fat free cream cheese at my grocery stores locally. It always seems to be out of stock. (SAVINGS 25 calories)
• Sugar: The second ingredient they use is sugar. At 773 calories per cup, that’s a lot of extra calories. Although the classic recipe uses 1/3 cup ( or 256 calories), their 4 servings of ice cream this makes is a little on the crazy side. It’s basically one serving to someone like me who loves to eat. So, I used Monk Sugar (Erythritol) for 0 calories. However, this does come with added carbs, so the carbs would seem it doesn’t match the calories. None the less, as a calorie counter, I chose the zero calorie sugar. (Savings: 256 calories)
• vanilla – Vanilla extract needs no low fat or light substitutions! But, getting real vanilla extract and not vanilla flavoring will give you the best taste here. (0 savings)
• Heavy cream– WOWZA I saved 650 calories here alone! 1 cup of heavy cream is 886 calories, and I used 1/3 cup for 225 calories.
• whole milk– and finally, I replaced the whole milk with skim milk for a total savings of 125 calories.

The Lite Setting on the Ninja Creami

After you’ve made some low fat, light substitutions to the classic recipe, you’ll want to use the “Lite Setting” on the Ninja Creami when you go to mix it after it’s frozen.

According to Ninja Creami fans on reddit, the Lite setting has a slower moving blade to cut through the “rock solid” ice you get when you freeze liquids without very little to no fat it in. Apparently if you are making a full fat version of ice cream, your product isn’t as rock solid hard.

And those are the questions you might be wondering! Now, for the RECIPE!! Print or pin it below.

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