• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Do Not Eat the Cookie Dough

Do You Eat Raw Cookie Dough?


  • Total voters
    32
When I was a kid, if my parents bought hamburger from a local grocery, the odds were pretty good that all meat involved came from a single cow. Because of modern efficient and cost effective processing, a single hamburger patty may contain the meat of up to forty cows, significantly raising to odds that it contains the meat of a cow that was sick. If a single sick cow goes into processing, then the meat of forty cows is tainted. That's why we're not supposed to eat raw hamburger anymore.

I'd imagine the preparation of steak tartare is probably regulated not unlike sushi.
 
I'm not disputing that raw meat can be dangerous, but then why do people still eat steak tartare?

When it comes to beef, by and large, there's not a lot of bacteria in it that we're generally afraid of. There certainly can be for sure, but in most cases probably not. That's why you can eat rarer steaks than you can with pork and certainly chicken. Both those kinds of meat care much more dangerous forms of bacteria.

With beef most of the bacteria we're afraid of lives on the outside of the beef which is quickly killed when exposed to the high-heat of cooking. Hamburger needs to be cooked to a higher temperature because now that outside is on the inside so you need to have the inside at a higher temperature to kill everything we're worried about.

What about steak tartare which is usually made of minced or ground beef? Ideally it should be made fresh at home from a whole piece of meat using clean home chopping or grinding devices. In such a case things are more or less safe as, again, there's not really a lot of bacteria we worry about on beef so using a fresh whole cut to start minimizes the risks of food-born bacteria.

Buying ground or minced beef at the store and using it for tartare is riskier since bacteria has had a chance to grow more on the inside of the meat, there's been more exposure, and not an entirely great continuity of temperature particularly from store to home and, as said above, the sources are coming from more than one animal.

But, in the end, ground beef or whole beef portions the risks of illness, or even hospitalization/death, from bacteria is pretty rare. Beef tends to be pretty much as close to "sterile" as you can get with raw meat. Always a slim risk, naturally, but food-born illness from beef is vast less than the risks with pork (which in present day is fairly low and not as bad as it was decades ago medium-done-ness pork is fine for certified pork that wasn't feed slop) and certainly chicken which contains the most worrisome bacterias.)
 
They can have my cookie dough when they pry it from my cold, dead, and sticky fingers.
For the 1.5 times per year that I actually make cookies, I may have a little blob of cookie dough to taste, but otherwise cookie dough doesn't do much for me.
 
Yes, I'll raw cookie dough and cake batter. I believe salmonella and other bacteria getting into eggs has been pretty much eliminated due to thicker egg shells. But, don't quote me on that!

Mr Awe
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top