Yonanas Ice Cream Maker Review

Stay tuned for our honest, personal Yonanas ice cream maker review. We’ve owned our Yonanas frozen dessert maker for five years now, and still use it regularly!

When it comes to ice cream, we’re not afraid to try something new. We’ve been known to travel for hours just to sample a new place. We often joke about the fact that we visited Turkey solely because that’s where dondurma (sticky ice cream) originated.

Yonanas Ice Cream Maker Review

When we had the chance to review the new Yonanas Classic frozen dessert maker we were excited to see what the fuss was about.

Ice cream without cream? Frozen treats that are not only healthy and delicious, but silky smooth in texture. Is that even possible?

See the Yonanas Classic frozen dessert maker on Amazon here!

We were excited to find out.

When our Yonanas machine finally arrived in the mail, I’m not sure who was more excited, me or the kids. I was also a little worried since the box we received it in was looking a little worse for wear. Luckily, everything seemed to be in good shape as we unpacked it.

I quickly took it apart and cleaned everything with hot soapy water. Comprising of only the main base, four unlocking pieces and the plunger, it reminded me of an inverted blender. Even down to the locking mechanism.

Once I untwisted the main chamber (don’t try it when it’s already wet), cleaning seemed pretty straight forward and since this thing is dishwasher friendly I’m expecting it to go in there more often than not.

That’s pretty much when we hit a roadblock. The kids and I were excited to test it out however we didn’t have any frozen bananas on hand. We had forgotten to pre-freeze any.

Can you use fruit other than bananas in a Yonanas dessert maker?

Here’s the short answer: Yes, but bananas work much better.

Undaunted, we grabbed some frozen berries and some frozen plums from our tree last fall and decided to give it a try. After waiting 10 minutes for the fruit to thaw (they recommend waiting 10 to 15 minutes for the frozen fruit to hit the right temperature) we dropped the berries in.

To our dismay, the first few raspberries we dumped in came out in little frozen chunks. We weren’t surprised. We had read that a small piece of banana should always be the first ingredient and we quickly learned why. The machine needs a base for the other fruits to grab onto.

Looking for something sweet and delicious? Check out our Greek Yogurt frut dip, and our chocolate fruit dip.

Not to be undone, we threw in some larger frozen strawberries and the machine started churning away. Next thing we knew we had a small bowl of ice cream like frozen berries. The texture was actually more like a gelato or sorbet and due to the lack of sugar was a little tart but it was delicious nonetheless.

The kids wanted more so we dumped in a cup of halved frozen plums, peel and all. It was delicious! We were all surprised at how good it was. Seeing that we have bags of plums from last fall’s harvest it’s nice to know we can make some inexpensive treats any time.

When it was time to clean again, I noticed that a lot of the peels stayed inside the machine. That was actually a good thing, however the machine holds a fair bit of dessert inside so make sure you open it up and scoop whatever is left before it all melts.

Bananas in the Yonanas machine

Now that we had tried it, we were definitely curious to see how bananas tasted. We grabbed a few that were spotted (the instructions call them cheetah spots), peeled them and threw them in the freezer. Now we just had to wait 24 hours for them to be ready.

The next day we pulled out some more berries and the two bananas.

We only threw in a small piece of banana to star,t however the difference in consistency was quickly apparent. Once the berries went through it was clear that the Yonanas maker was clearly designed with  bananas in mind. The texture of the frozen bananas is ridiculously creamy.

Once it all went through we mixed it by hand with the berries and the taste was definitely more like ice cream than sorbet. The kids loved it and ate it faster than if it was ice cream! It was so good that later that night we picked up a few extra pounds of bananas solely for the Yonanas machine.

We’re all excited to see what kind of concoctions we can make with it. Chocolate and bananas, strawberries and mint, peaches, Oreos, pear and raspberries, chocolate sauce and cherries… You get the idea. There is an endless amount of combinations that we’re planning to try.

As you can probably guess, we’re big fans of the Yonanas Classic frozen dessert maker. Like smoothies, it’s a healthy way to enjoy some delicious fruits and makes dessert time all the more enjoyable.

The biggest problem I can see is making sure we have enough frozen fruit on hand to keep it going. Thankfully, summer is here and we’ll make sure we freeze enough by the fall to keep our Yonanas maker busy all winter.

See prices and more reviews here for the Yonanas Classic frozen dessert maker.

Disclosure: We received a Yonanas original dessert maker for this review, but our love of ice cream is all our own.