Review: Cocinaré Krush Portable Ice Cream Maker

Eating ice cream is a decidedly time-sensitive activity. It’s meant to be enjoyed quickly and in the moment, save for the bold few who don’t fear a melty mess. Kitchen appliance maker Cocinaré said no, the masses need not be limited by science and thus invented the Krush, a $149 battery-powered portable machine that can make and transport ice cream anywhere. It consists of four parts: a freezer bowl, a plastic cover for the bowl that protects your hands, a plastic piece with little see-through sections so you can watch your ice cream as it’s made, and a top piece containing a motor with a blade attachment that stirs your frozen dessert into existence.

Along with the main components, you get a travel case should you want to haul the entire machine with you, and a smaller insulated bag that holds just the bottom half of the machine with a lid for securely transporting your ice cream. The Krush sells you on its simplicity and the freedom to enjoy still-frozen ice cream anytime, anywhere.

My experience was quite different. A beautiful but ultimately confusing product design seriously hurt the Krush’s usability. The companion app containing ice cream recipes was much closer to beta software than anything fully formed, complete with missing back buttons, wonky recipes with descriptions that didn’t match the instructions, and one particularly offensive recipe for orange creamsicle ice cream that called for green cabbage.

The bottom half of the Krush slips into an insulated jacket so you can have an ice cream picnic.

Photograph: Megan Wollerton

The Krush did a fine job keeping ice cream cold for an hour while I was at a park. I felt a smug pleasure eating it, still entirely spoonable and delicious, on a bench in 80-degree Fahrenheit temps with no ice cream shop in sight. Still, this ice cream maker was way more trouble than touted, and I can’t recommend it, especially for $150. And that’s the sale price; it’s usually $199.

Things started out promising enough. The machine arrived in sturdy black packaging with images of happy people eating homemade ice cream and a note that read: “Have a Krush! Make ice cream like never before.”

Out of the box, the Krush is attractive and feels sturdy. I opted for the black finish, but it also comes in teal blue, and it is available on both the Cocinaré site and Amazon.

It’s battery powered and comes with a USB-C to USB-A charging cable but no wall plug. I have a surplus of those things lying around, so that wasn’t a problem.

There’s a quick-start guide, some tips on how to use your Krush, and a little card instructing you to download the Cocinaré app. The app has recipes written by Cocinaré, and a community section where people can post questions and comments and share their own recipes. The card had a special code for a year of free access to a premium membership level in the app, which typically costs $10 per month, $25 per quarter, or $80 per year.

The free version of the app includes only “basic smoothie recipes,” according to Cocinaré, while the paid version has over 500 recipes and more nutrition information. $80 a year would be a lot even for a functional app full of recipes, but, as I’ll get into below, this app had a lot of issues.

I cleaned all the parts, wiped off the motor, and set the bowl in the freezer. It needs to freeze for 10 to 12 hours in an upright position before use, which is standard for home ice cream makers without a built-in compressor. At 7.9 inches tall and 6.7 inches wide, the freezer bowl might not easily fit if you have a small freezer or very little room in your freezer.

There's also a lid and a bag for carrying the finished ice cream.

Photograph: Megan Wollerton

To avoid losing any errant parts, the Krush is best stored upright and fully assembled in a cabinet or on your countertop. You can also pack it up in the travel case and stash it pretty much anywhere, though a standard-size drawer with a height of three or four inches wouldn’t be big enough.

The motorized top half of the Krush takes up to three hours to charge fully, and you can’t charge it and use it at the same time. Indicators on the motor flash a red light below 25 percent, orange when it’s between 25 and 49 percent, green when it’s between 50 and 99 percent, and a steady green light when it’s at 100 percent. My model flashed orange out of the box and took about an hour to turn solid green.

Cocinaré says you’re supposed to get as many as 15 uses out of a charged Krush, and that matched my experience. I ran 11 tests with this machine and didn’t have to recharge it once.

The companion app is disappointing. It asks you for your fitness goals (Reminder: This an ice cream machine) and some recipes are only available if you pay a monthly fee to unlock them.

Cocinare via Megan Wollerton

The Cocinaré app was frustrating. I counted 232 recipes for the company’s GoPower Elite Personal Blender, but only a few dozen options for the ice cream maker. And as you may have surmised from the orange creamsicle ice cream recipe with green cabbage I mentioned above, the Cocinaré brand has a strong healthy lifestyle focus, and the app follows suit.

A profile section on the top left of the app asks you to list your goals, and the options confusingly include fitness- and nutrition-focused things like “lose weight,” “modify my diet,” and “gain muscle.” Since I was there to eat ice cream, I skipped over this part and moved on.

Certain pages in the app are missing back buttons, so to backtrack, you have to leave the app and click back through to get where you want to go. There was no significant difference between the free app and the “premium” version, either. I saw the exact same ice cream recipes in both tiers, both before and after signing up for the premium membership. The nutrition info for the recipes is accessible only to paid members, and while it’s moderately useful, it didn’t add enough value to make a paid subscription worthwhile.

Multiple recipes had wonky descriptions, like, “Homemade chocolate ice cream without an ice cream machine,” though they’re (supposed to be) specifically for the Krush, which is an ice cream machine.

I chose the two most basic ice cream recipes the app offered: vanilla and chocolate. To get a variety of ingredients, including a couple nondairy options, I selected three other recipes I found online: cookies and cream coconut milk ice cream, strawberry oat milk ice cream, and banana ice cream. These recipes were made for traditional home ice cream machines, so I adjusted the amount of each ingredient for the Krush’s smaller size, but made no other modifications.

At long last, it’s ice cream time. Unfortunately, this is where I ran into major issues.

The motor portion of the Krush doesn’t screw into the base of the machine. It rests on top of the base in little grooves but is otherwise free to rattle away while it makes ice cream. A call to customer service confirmed that this is indeed normal. But because of this design, the top of the machine lifted away from the base as the blade tried to mix the ingredients, causing it to move around enough to knock it from the grooves to varying levels of performance failure during four of my 11 tests.

Two of the four times, the machine kept running but the top jumped up and down continuously and did not mix the ice cream ingredients well. The other two times, the parts separated so much that the Krush beeped, flashed red, and stopped running entirely.

The customer support person did say the top shouldn’t lift away so much that it stalls, but a quick look at reviews for the device on Amazon confirmed that at least one other person experienced the same thing while using their Krush.

I got tasty ice cream on the other seven tries (minus the coconut milk recipe, which never progressed beyond a thick soup). The little cooler bag held up well in the midday sun, too. But, disappointingly, the machine’s max fill line is just 210 grams. Depending on the density of the ingredients you use, that’s somewhere between one to two servings—and that wasn’t nearly enough ice cream for the effort.

I was so intrigued by the Krush. Sadly, it’s expensive, the app added no value (neither the free nor paid versions), its odd design resulted in poor performance, and it only made a couple servings at a time.

I’d much rather take my chances with a pint from the local store stowed in one of those insulated bags that delivery services sometimes use for frozen goods. Or, like I did before the Krush came into my life, pop by Dairy Queen on my way home to pick up some ice cream.