My wife got sick as a dog after eating chocolate chip cookie dough. She spent a whole day going between bed and the bathroom. Strangely enough, she still eats raw cookie dough. Having gone through it with her, I don’t even like the fake/safe cookie dough in ice cream.
Looked up a recipe and it seems pretty easy to make non-raw edible cookie dough. Cook the flour in the microwave, and then substitute out the eggs with extra butter and milk.
I've always found the safe to eat raw cookie dough to not be very good, nothing compared with real cookie dough. But the fake stuff is all I could find that wouldn't risk me getting ill. One day I was at a local grocery store and couldn't find my stupid fake cookie dough, and the worker said they didn't care it any more, but he was pretty sure Pillbury changed the recipe of their take and bake cookie dough so it can be eaten raw, or baked first.
This proved to be true, and dangerous. It takes TOO good, it's problematic:
Luckily, I only bought a tube, and thank deity I didn't see a tube there. But I have to tell you, one full tube consumed over the course of a weekend, by me, and individual, and no one else.... You reach the end of that tube and there are no lies to tell ones self "Other people helped, it wasn't just you". Nope, just you, you alone ate that tube.
The study says 34% of whole eggs tested positive for salmonella which is insane.
The CDC says 1 on 20 000. We use raw eggs in many recipes, lots of restaurants still make home made mayo. Not to mention the thousands who eat them raw everyday in smoothies like me. I pass an 18 pack of raw eggs in a week.
I'm guessing only certain strains of salmonella actually make you sick or the study is just shit because that's the only way it makes sense.
Hmm... my family demands I make French Silk pie for the holidays and that involves 4 raw eggs per pie. Always knew there was a risk but I've never had any trouble in 20 years. Wonder how long our luck will last.
Most salmonella exposure will cause mild symptoms like a day of runny stools. If you eat raw dough with any frequency, you have almost certainly been exposed to it and experienced mild symptoms. It's a much bigger risk for people with weak immune systems.
There is a risk yes, more so than many other foods we eat, how much of a risk is impossible to generalize and depends on too many factors. Cooking significantly reduces the risk, so the safest thing is to just say you shouldn't eat it raw because no one wants to be held responsible nor live with the guilt if you die of food poisoning from eating cookie dough at their suggestion. No one can actually prevent you from doing it, and whether you want to depends on your own assessment of the risks in any particular instance, and your risk tolerance.
Where does the salmonella come from, though? Is it in the raw flour, or the raw eggs? If you know you want to eat the cookie dough , there's no point adding eggs at all - they don't bring any flavour. As for the flour, it doesn't bring flavour but it's probably important to the texture of the dough.
So what happens if you pour the flour onto a sheet pan and bake it at 300-325F for 30 mins all by itself? Would that kill everything in there that needs killing, so you can then make cookie dough that's safe to eat?
Just microwave or bake the flour then make cookie dough normally.
There is a much higher risk of getting salmonella from raw flour than from raw egg, since store bought eggs are pasteurized and washed (in USA/Canada).
Eggs in the shell in the US are not pasteurized unless specifically labeled, only about 3% of them, but they are washed. Any egg product out of the shell, like in a milk carton type container is pasteurized.
Everywhere actually. Salmonella in the poultry business was a huge deal and now the salmonella vaccines are some of the cheapest to produce. If your chickens aren't vaccinated you pretty much aren't selling them to anyone anywhere. I'm too tired to elaborate, but I used to work in the industry and salmonella in poultry is pretty much a thing of the past.
People do get salmonella from eating raw egg. Egg is often an ingredient in cookie mix, so SOME cookie dough puts you at risk, and the egg-free ones don’t. Check the label carefully.
Raw flour is a surprisingly big culprit in raw cookie dough too. No matter what your are baking, you’re gonna want to avoid eating anything with raw flour or you’ll risk some ugly food poisoning (learned that the hard way).
If you want to make your own raw cookie dough at home, you need to heat-treat your flour to 160°F first to kill salmonella and e-coli bacteria. Then you can eat all the raw batter you want :)
Yep, we refrigerate pre washed eggs here in the US. Never really had issues with shelf life, and we don’t have to wash them or handle chicken feces in the kitchen. I imagine the risk of contamination from handling unwashed eggs is probably about the same as the risk of having potentially sooner to spoil eggs in the fridge.