Copycat In-N-Out Milkshake: All 3 Flavors + the Neapolitan

In-N-Out has exactly three milkshake flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. There is a fourth one, and it isn’t on the menu board — the Neapolitan, all three at once, which anyone who has waited in a drive-thru line in California knows to ask for by name.

This post covers all four. The single base recipe works for any flavor, and the Neapolitan gets its own section because it has one real problem that nobody warns you about.

But first, the thing that separates an In-N-Out shake from every other fast-food shake, because if you miss this, the copycat won’t taste right no matter what else you do.

Why In-N-Out Shakes Taste Different

They’re made with real ice cream.

Most fast-food shakes aren’t. What comes out of the machine at most drive-thrus is soft serve or a shake mix — a dairy blend engineered to be pumped through a spout, lighter in fat and whipped full of air. It’s a genuinely different product, and it’s why a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake has that smooth, slightly airy body while an In-N-Out shake is dense enough to fight your straw.

This has three consequences for the copycat:

Use real ice cream, not soft serve or frozen yogurt. A full-fat, straightforward supermarket ice cream is exactly right here. This is not the recipe to reach for the light stuff.

Don’t over-thin it. The most common mistake is adding milk until it pours easily. An In-N-Out shake doesn’t pour easily. It’s meant to be thick enough that the first pull on the straw takes effort.

Skip the malt. In-N-Out shakes aren’t malted. If malt is what you’re actually after, that’s the Wendy’s Frosty — malted milk powder is the whole secret over there, and it belongs in that recipe, not this one.

The Ninja Creami is well suited to this because the MILKSHAKE program is built to spin already-frozen ice cream into a shake without whipping air into it. There’s no 24-hour freeze and no waiting. You’re working with ice cream that’s already frozen, so this is a ten-minute recipe.

Ingredients

Per pint — one pint makes one generous shake, or one layer of a Neapolitan.

For any flavor:

• 1½ cups ice cream (chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry), straight from the freezer
• ⅓ cup whole milk, cold
• A pinch of salt

Flavor boosters — optional but they close the gap:

• Vanilla: 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, or ½ teaspoon vanilla bean paste
• Chocolate: 1 tablespoon chocolate syrup
• Strawberry: 2 tablespoons strawberry puree, or 3 sliced fresh strawberries mashed with a fork

A note on the milk: whole milk. Two percent works and skim technically works, but both push the shake toward thin and icy, and thin is the exact failure mode this recipe is trying to avoid.

The pinch of salt does more than you’d expect. Commercial ice cream bases carry more salt than most home cooks use, and it’s part of why the drive-thru version tastes sharper. It costs you nothing to add.

How to Make One Flavor

Step One. Scoop the ice cream into an empty Ninja Creami pint container. Keep it below the MAX FILL line — the mixture expands as it spins, and an overfilled pint is the fastest way to a stuck container.

Step Two. In a small bowl, stir the milk, salt, and your flavor booster together until fully combined. Dissolving these into the milk first matters — syrup dropped straight onto frozen ice cream tends to streak instead of distributing.

Step Three. Use the back of a spoon to bore a hole about 1½ inches wide straight down the center of the ice cream to the bottom of the pint. Pour the milk mixture into that hole.

This step looks fussy and isn’t. It’s the single technique that separates a smooth Creami shake from a lumpy one — it puts the liquid where the paddle starts working instead of leaving it sitting on top.

Step Four. Install the pint in the outer bowl, lock the lid, and select MILKSHAKE.

Step Five. Check the texture. If it’s thicker than you want, add a tablespoon of milk and run RE-SPIN. If it’s thinner than you want, you’ve already added too much milk — see the troubleshooting section below.

Serve immediately, in a chilled glass if you have thirty seconds to spare.

The Neapolitan: The Problem Nobody Warns You About

Here’s what goes wrong.

You put chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream into one pint, hit MILKSHAKE, and the Creami does exactly what it’s designed to do: it homogenizes. What comes out is a uniform muddy brown shake that tastes vaguely of all three and distinctly of none. It’s not bad. It’s just not a Neapolitan.

An actual In-N-Out Neapolitan keeps the three flavors readable. You get chocolate, then vanilla, then strawberry, and the whole point is that they arrive as three separate things.

The fix is to spin them separately and layer in the glass.

Three pints, three spins, three flavors kept intact. It sounds like more work than it is — each spin takes about two minutes and you can prep all three pints at once.

How to layer it:

1. Spin all three pints, one flavor at a time. Keep each finished shake in its pint in the freezer while you spin the next.
2. In a tall glass, spoon in the chocolate first. It’s the densest of the three and it holds the base well.
3. Add the vanilla next, spooning it gently against the inside of the glass rather than dropping it straight down.
4. Strawberry on top.
5. Serve with a long spoon and a wide straw. Don’t stir it — the layers are the recipe.

Three pints makes three generous shakes when layered this way. If you only want one or two, halve the ice cream in each pint; the Creami still spins a partial pint fine as long as the liquid ratio holds.

The shortcut version: if you want a Neapolitan and don’t want to run three spins, spin the vanilla alone, then swirl a spoonful each of chocolate syrup and strawberry puree through it by hand at the end. It isn’t the real thing, but it takes four minutes and it keeps the flavors distinct, which is more than the all-in-one-pint approach manages.

Troubleshooting

Too thin. Almost always too much milk. There’s no adding ice cream back once it’s spun — return the pint to the freezer for 30 to 45 minutes and re-spin. Next time, start with ¼ cup of milk instead of ⅓ and add from there.

Too thick to drink. Add a tablespoon of milk and run RE-SPIN. Repeat once if needed. Adding a lot of milk at once and spinning is worse than adding a little twice.

Crumbly or powdery after the first spin. Normal. It means the base was very solid. A tablespoon of milk and a RE-SPIN fixes it, and this happens more often with ice cream taken straight from a cold freezer than with ice cream that sat out for two minutes.

Icy rather than creamy. Usually a low-fat ice cream, or skim milk, or both. Fat is doing structural work in a shake, and there’s no technique that compensates for not having enough of it.

The Neapolitan came out brown. You spun all three together. Nothing to fix in that pint — spin separately next time.

Variations

Chocolate malt. Not In-N-Out, but a good shake. Two tablespoons of malted milk powder into the milk mixture.

Cookies and cream. Crushed sandwich cookies stirred in after the spin, using the MIX-IN program if your model has one. If cookies-and-cream is what you’re really after, the Sonic Oreo chocolate shake and the Chick-fil-A cookies and cream shake are both built around it properly.

Coffee. A tablespoon of instant espresso dissolved into the milk turns the chocolate version into something close to the Arby’s Jamocha shake.

Higher protein. Swap half the milk for a protein shake and expect a firmer, slightly drier result. Greek yogurt in the Creami works too, though it takes the flavor somewhere tangier than a drive-thru shake.

For a crowd. The Creami makes one shake at a time, which is fine for a family and frustrating for a party. If you’re making shakes for eight people, the Ninja Slushi vanilla milkshake makes 40 ounces in one go and doesn’t need ice cream at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

What flavors does In-N-Out actually have? Three on the menu — chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry — plus the Neapolitan, which combines all three and has to be ordered by name. It’s the best known of the not-really-secret menu items.

Can I make this without a Ninja Creami? Yes. Blend the same ingredients on low in a standard blender for 20 to 30 seconds, no longer. Over-blending warms the shake and thins it. The Creami’s advantage is that it produces a denser shake without incorporating air, which is closer to what In-N-Out serves.

Do I need to freeze the pint for 24 hours first? No. That rule applies to Creami recipes built from a liquid base. You’re starting with ice cream that’s already frozen solid, which is why this recipe takes ten minutes instead of a day.

Why is my shake so much thinner than the drive-thru version? Two likely causes: too much milk, or a lower-fat ice cream. In-N-Out shakes are dense because they’re real ice cream, and density is the first thing you lose when you cut fat or add liquid.

Can I use chocolate milk instead of chocolate syrup? You can, but reduce the total milk to ¼ cup — chocolate milk is thinner than whole milk and will push the shake toward soupy. If you want a deeper chocolate, the syrup gives you flavor without extra liquid, which is also how the McDonald’s chocolate milkshake version handles it.

How long will it keep? It won’t, really. A shake is a five-minute recipe for a reason. Leftovers refreeze into a solid block, and while you can re-spin that block the next day, the texture is never quite the same.