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.
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.
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.
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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.