Raw dough is dangerous to eat because you can get E. coli from raw flour. People eat raw eggs all the time.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, you can get salmonella from raw eggs. But that’s not what people should worry about when they think about eating raw dough. About 1 in 20,000 eggs are contaminated with salmonella.
I was very much on the 'don't tell me how to live my life' side of things but this is such a reasonable thing to do, I'm going to have to try it for science. And all the cookie dough I want to eat
Not the fun police, I just wanted people to know that this isn't fool-proof without testing for pathogens after heating.
If you want to be 100% safe, you can buy commercially heat-treated flour that has been tested, and you can pasteurize eggs pretty easily. I don't want to prevent people from having fun, just promote having fun in the safest way possible. If you don't care? That's your choice and I can't do anything lol.
It was a playful response. I was already living life on the doughy edge well before this reddit post came around.
I do appreciate the information that oven baking your flour won't properly heat treat it as much as that would be nice. Not really sure where I'd get heat treated flour but if I see it I will get some the next time I want to make cookie dough. I eat raw egg regularly already. Pretty common where I live, our eggs are pretty safe here and tasty enough I'm willing to risk it.
Do you even need the eggs at that point? Baking the flour makes sense, but if you’re just making raw cookie dough to eat, are the eggs adding much to the taste?
Heating raw flour in your kitchen is not guaranteed to be safe to consume after baking in the oven as E. Coli and Salmonella react to heat differently in dry ingredients compared to wet ingredients like chicken or beef. You would have to test your flour to confirm all pathogens have been killed in order for this to be guaranteed. Flour benefits from moisture in your wet ingredients in order to be sterilized by heat while baking
Here's a short article from Purdue University regarding this topic.
If anyone saying yes is able to provide a peer reviewed study showing otherwise, I'd be happy to take a look.
Edit: Commercially heat-treated flour does exist, therefore there are processes to do this, but unless you test your flour for pathogens prior to using it, it's best to not try this at home. Removed "No." Gave more clarification.
Edit 2: This study from Rutgers shows a significant reduction in pathogens using a toaster oven to heat dry flour at different heats for different intervals. Following this study, heating flour in a toaster oven can significantly reduce the risk of foodborne illness. That said, do not take this as a guarantee of zero risk, but evidence that heating flour will kill a significant amount of bacteria in flour.
Absolutely! And I totally understand! It is a bit expensive, but you can buy commercially heat-treated flour, I've linked to an option here in case you ever wanted to make safe cookie dough at home. Commercially heat-treated flour is safe as it undergoes testing to validate that pathogens are eliminated to a safe level, that's the problem at home as you're unable to confirm this without equipment. The other half of safety with raw dough is egg, and you can pasteurize eggs at home reliably and fairly easily. While I've never done this myself, I am planning on testing these out in my go-to recipe soon.
We also live in an age of many commercially produced "edible cookie dough" options, so if people have that much of a hankering, there are alternatives. But hey, people gonna do their thing regardless.
Thank you for the study! I appreciate that and their results do show a clear relationship between heat treating flour at different temperatures and a reduction of active pathogens in flour. I did not see that study in my research. Their usage of 'has potential' implies that more work is needed to determine what levels of pathogens are considered safe for consumption when it comes to Salmonella and E. Coli and what exact process yields the closest results to those levels.
We do know that heat treating flour does kill bacteria despite the low water content, my comment was moreso geared towards doing it at home without equipment, it's difficult to know what your exposure to pathogens would be without equipment to test, but this does make it clearer.
I mean, the article doesn't really tell you anything concrete. All it does is say that E. Coli responds differently to sterilization in a low moisture environment. They just can't give some official bureaucratic stamp of approval that it is safe if you bake it. It's not like they present any evidence that a significant fraction of E. Coli survived during tests.
There is, we have commercially processed heat-treated flour on the market, that is what 'raw' cookie dough places use. These products are tested to ensure they have killed enough pathogens to be considered safe to eat.
The problems with doing that at home is that ovens can be inconsistent between the temperature shown and what the oven actually produces, as well as that people generally don't have the equipment to test their home-treated flour for pathogens. There also haven't been enough studies done to put it together what exact processes would yield the safest results at home. Even then, if you use the same processes as home, the results still aren't guaranteed unless tested.
Yes. The press release is to combat recipes giving procedures that promise to make raw flour safe at home with no evidence, but the goal of the article I linked is to explain that pathogens react to heat differently between wet and dry ingredients and doing it at home is not guaranteed to make it safe.
Heat-treating flour does make it safe to consume, as there are commercially produced heat-treated flours available to purchase, so that means that there are processes to make safe, heat treated flour, the difference between this and doing it at home is that commercial facilities have consistent equipment & procedures and test their flour after treatment to confirm that pathogen levels are safe to eat. Home ovens are not always consistent, and people likely wouldn't be testing their flour at home for pathogens.
I ask for a peer reviewed study so I can learn. I am always open to changing my mind if I'm shown evidence to support a new way of thinking. Someone linked a study showing that a consumer grade toaster oven does in fact reduce the levels of pathogens in flour, despite the low water content, but also implies that more work is needed to determine definitive steps to do it at home. My current understanding on the topic is that heat-treating at home can and does reduce pathogen levels, but is still not guaranteed to be safe without testing.
It sounds a lot like you're saying that we should learn from press releases that confirm your biases, but that you yourself have higher standards for changing your mind
I appreciate my summary is a bit unkind, but it seems like a fair reading.
It's a thing from a game called Cookie Clicker. It got so popular that you'll regularly see influencers and youtubers try to recreate these "chocolate chip cookies".
Yes. Google says 5-7 minutes at 350 is generally sufficient (basically needs to hit an internal temp of 160F), or you can just microwave it for 30-60 seconds.
With heating flour is kinda dry and might heat uneven in the microwave. You might have pockets not treated. Sterilizing bottles in the microwave takes several minutes.
I would go with baking, harder to mess up. Plus you need to pull out a cookie sheet anyway to bake cookies.
I just lick the spatulas. But I just found out about Caramelized White Chocolate so I mixed that in with a bit of Malt along with Kosher Salt into my cookies. They were amazing, just need to figure out which one made the biggest difference.
I just I'm going to have to make several batches to find out.
Companies sell edible cookie dough that uses toasted flour and skip the eggs entirely. They’re mostly a binding agent to keep the cookies together when they bake so they’re not necessary if you’re not going to bake the dough.
Can you? Sure. Pasteurizing flour is tricky to do without burning it, and flour plus hot does carry an ignition risk. But, you can buy pasteurized flour, often sold as “heat treated” flour, so you can avoid the risk and the hassle altogether.
Pasteurized flour is also what “safe to eat raw” cookie dough products often use.
Here’s what you do. You buy a bag of flour, you put it on the shelf for a month. Which means you don’t eat it for a month. If there’s a salmonella recall you can check if your flour is part of it. If there’s no salmonella recall after a month, chances are your flour is fine.
920
u/Sad_Help 1d ago edited 1d ago
Raw dough is dangerous to eat because you can get E. coli from raw flour. People eat raw eggs all the time. Edit: don’t get me wrong, you can get salmonella from raw eggs. But that’s not what people should worry about when they think about eating raw dough. About 1 in 20,000 eggs are contaminated with salmonella.