Raw egg prevention needed - Page 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by SomethingTasty 

Me again.. I was just buying eggs this morning, and I read on the cover of the brand I always buy.. UV disinfected.. does this mean that their UV process could kill the possible salmonella in the eggs?

ON the eggs, not IN the eggs.

Ultraviolet has been used aging meats for years ,it works only on outside of an item, and since the outside is the main problem your safe. Ultra violet rays  are not  penatrating rays

so they do nothing to inside of product  and since salmonella is outside anyway again your safe.

   Salmonella only gets inside if egg is cracked or when you break it open and subject it to outer shell. The egg however could have a blood spot in it but this is not salmonella.

There's been a strain of salmonella that can infect the chicken's egg tract, and get inside the eggs, but it's been around for years and we've done a good job keeping it out of the food supply.

Salmonella poisoning is extremely unlikely in any random, individual egg. But even if one out of a thousand eggs is infected, it can problem for restaurants that serve eggs regularly. I never worry about it at home.

I have backyard chickens. The thing to remember if you're getting fresh eggs is that the shells are porous -- if you wash them with plain water, you can assume some of whatever's on the outside of the egg is getting absorbed into the interior. It's actually safer to leave bits of droppings on the outside of the egg than to wash them in water. And soap is out of the question -- it ruins the flavor of the egg. Commercial operations use egg washes and sanitizers that are carefully formulated to be too viscous to soak through the shell.

Usually if you get salmonella from a restaurant there has been a sort of perfect storm of bad food practices. The egg has to have been contaminated, poorly sanitized, left unrefrigerated so the salmonella thrives, improperly cooked after being cracked, and then improperly refrigerated again so the salmonella can spread through the dish. Even then, it's usually unlikely that any one individual customer will eat enough to get sick (though the frail, young, or elderly are always at higher risk).

That said... there's always that one egg in a thousand that's unsafe. If a thousand people eat raw eggs, and one gets sick, it's not going to make him feel any better knowing that he was a statistical anomaly.

Strictly speaking, any time you eat a fried egg with runny yolks you're taking a risk. But we all happily eat them and feed them to our kids every day.

Nobody ever tests eggs, sorts them by severity of infection, and then feeds them to people to see if they get sick. Which is why the rules are so strict -- the people making the rules, the grocers, and the restaurants can't afford to make mistakes.

The latest food safety recommendation I read was that all eggs should always be cooked until the yolks and whites are solid with no runny liquids. I can't imagine anybody actually doing that.

But most of the time you get a severely infected egg, which is then cooked improperly, and then put in a larger dish (like egg salad) where it's left unrefrigerated to spread and contaminate the whole thing.

I eat maybe one or two raw eggs a month, usually in my favorite caesar dressing. If one in a thousand eggs is infected, I'm pretty secure in my odds. I feel safe.

If I was serving the same dressing in a restaurant, going through dozens of eggs a week, I'd no longer feel safe. I'd order pasteurized egg product, even though it's trickier to use in emulsifications. Eventually you're going to get that one-in-a-thousand egg. And eventually that egg is going to go in a batch that somebody forgets to refrigerate. And then people get sick.

I saw some sort of TV news magazine expose on that once. They found whole pallets of eggs left unrefrigerated for days in the back of supermarkets. There's absolutely nothing a random consumer can do to notice or prevent this -- those eggs look exactly the same once they get on the shelves.

But I have to say from personal experience stocking eggs/dairy at Walmart that I never saw this happen. Eggs were wheeled straight into the big walk-in fridge from the refrigerated trucks.

What I DID see was stockers not rotating eggs. They frequently would just shove the new cartons in front of the old ones. I once went through the entire egg section and tossed all the expired eggs and it was over a full cartload, and complained to the manager. I didn't see that problem again, but who knows how long it had been going on?

I didn't think it needed refrigeration. But if you're asking what I would do, I'd microwave it for 10 seconds at a time until it was as thin as you want. Same thing I do with chocolate syrup or honey.

I've always kept Nutella in a cupboard, at room temp. That's also where it was kept when I was a kid. I've never, ever seen a jar of Nutella go bad. Then again they don't usually last too long. 

The only thing a temperature of 80 Degreed will kill is you ( Acute Hypothermia and death)

Quote:

Originally Posted by chefedb 

The only thing a temperature of 80 Degreed will kill is you ( Acute Hypothermia and death)

Hm, 80°F (27°C) possibly, 80°C (176°F) probably will kill a lot of bacteria and overcook many foods
 

Most Salmonella will be eliminated at 165-170 F.  There are some strains of bacteria that even 200 F will not totally kill.  80 C is ok for Salmonella strains in most cases.

Just make sure they are tempered before you use/cook them and it will be fine!!

You have a 0.003% or 1 in 30,000 chance of any 1 egg being contaminated by salmonella. Is that really that scary?

Quote:

Originally Posted by pcieluck 

You have a 0.003% or 1 in 30,000 chance of any 1 egg being contaminated by salmonella. Is that really that scary?

It is if you're a restaurant serving tens of thousands of eggs a year. Eventually the odds will catch up with you. Otherwise, frankly, no. The odds are so slim that any individual egg is contaminated, and that that egg will be the one you happen to use in a raw egg recipe, that they can be safely ignored by most reasonable people.

Chefs and teachers and TV shows have to be wary what they teach, however. Liability issues being what they are, if they say to play the odds, and somebody dies, they could be sued. So they always emphasize safety.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SomethingTasty 

Yeah, the chances are very small for home users, but what about the fact that no supermarket in my country refrigerates eggs? Count on it that whatever I use them for, they have been kept at around 25 degrees Celsius, even if more in summertime.. Isn't that a higher risk for salmonella?

25°C or 45°F is the generally accepted safe storage temperature for eggs, at least in the U.S.A.

Will regards to the "odds catching up to you", regardless of the number of eggs you eat or the number of eggs served where you eat, the odds remain the same, "odds" do NOT "catch up to you"!

Reminds me of an old joke about an executive that liked a raw egg in his afternoon pick me up blended drink. With all the news about salmonella in raw eggs, he asked his IT department to calculate the odds of consuming an infected egg. They came up with nearly the same odds, about 1:30,000. After several years of consuming the raw eggs every day, he began to be concerned. He then went to the IT department and asked what the odds of consuming two infected eggs would be. They calculated that it would be something on the order of 1:90,000,000. Ever since then he has consumed a raw egg before leaving his house to "improve the odds"
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeteMcCracken 

Will regards to the "odds catching up to you", regardless of the number of eggs you eat or the number of eggs served where you eat, the odds remain the same, "odds" do NOT "catch up to you"!

Good points. Odds do not remember the past. If the roulette ball just fell on black 53 times in a row, you still have a 1 in 2 probability of getting black on the next turn. 

Statistics are easily misunderstood.

The odds of flipping a coin twice and getting two heads in a row are 1:4, or 25%.

But after having flipped a heads, the coin can't remember the past flip. It doesn't care. The next flip has a 1:2 chance of being heads, 50%.

Both statements are true, but people tend to misunderstand statistics by understanding only one example and not the other. They don't understand how both statements can be true, when in fact they don't contradict each other at all.

The odds of any individual egg making you sick might truly be 1:30000. The odds of encountering a contaminated egg increase with the number of eggs eaten, since you're subjecting yourself to that 1:30000 chance multiple times.

That is to say, if you had a fair die with 30000 sides, and rolled it once, the odds of rolling a 1 are exactly 1:30000. But if you had ten thousand such dice, and rolled them all at the same time, the odds of rolling at least one 1 are considerably higher than that. I used to know the equations by heart but that was years ago.

In that sense, your odds of encountering a bad egg do increase the more eggs you eat, though the odds of the next egg being infected are identical to those of every other egg. Just as your odds of catching a cold increase with the number of people whose hand you shake during cold season.

By the way, you would not believe the statistics arguments that I've seen on the internet in role-playing game forums. The coin example above, by itself, started a 30 page long argument between people who only understood one example or the other.

I do use raw eggs at home all the time. even feel okay about doing it for family when making deserts on holidays for ~30-40 people.  In the restaurant though, I treat my eggs like they might have aids. Here's the problem with it...  whenever I use eggs in a restaurant I'm breaking hundreds of them at a time. So that 1 in 30,000 beaten into a big batch of something using several hundred eggs can potentially harm hundreds of people! not just one. But this is more about proper storage in my eyes, not a refusal to eat a raw egg. I will gladly taste the pancake batter, or french toast batter raw, to make sure it's not to sweet, salty, w/e.

That all said, the best food in the world tends to come with the greatest risk... sushi, raw oyster and especially Fugu... Does the process of preserved anything sound safe or even appetizing? no but it's delicious and worth the small risk! People will gladly order steak rare and accept the fact that as long as that tiny disclaimer is at the bottom, the restaurant is not responsible IF you get sick from rare chicken, if that's how you dare to order it.  Wild mushrooms, the likeliness that every given person is allergic to at least one type of nut. How about the fact that many of the most commonly used fruits and vegetables have both edible and highly toxic parts? Potatoes, rhubarb, tomato... the seeds form apricots, cherries, apples, plums, almonds, and peaches. and back to the point, eggs. even cooked eggs are best left a little runny, and far under that 160 that they say is needed to kill salmonella.

I just think associations and the like have people way too terrified to try GOOD food now days.

"It would be impossible to have a business like this in the States. The wood burning fire, illegal! The meat, illegal! The cheese sitting out on cubard, illegal! Basically everything that makes this place good would be illegal in the states!" -Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations, Why French People Don't Suck.