eli5: How is raw egg dangerous to eat (in America at least) but runny egg yolk is perfectly fine?
In: Biology
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The U.S. doesn’t vaccinate their chickens against salmonella. However it’s not a common problem because we also wash the eggs which removes the film on the outside of the egg. Which is why we also refrigerate our eggs.
Now, that film is protective and leaving it on does mean no need to refrigerate, however the film is also more likely to transfer salmonella into the egg itself when its cracked open. Which raises the chance of contamination… which is why Europe vaccinates their chickens.
It all results in similar levels of risk.
Of course the best thing to do would be to wash the eggs AND vaccinate the chickens, but, ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The premise is wrong. It’s not perfectly fine. If you go to any restaurant that serves eggs benedict, etc., you will find a warning on the menu that says there are risks to undercooked eggs.
That said, risk is a sliding scale. There is not a binary “100% safe” vs “100% dangerous”.
Your risk of foodborne illness from eating a single raw egg is quite low, but not zero. Let’s say it’s 1% chance of getting an illness (it’s actually much lower, but this is a simple number to look at.) Even the odds of getting it from a fully hard-boiled egg is not zero, but it’s much lower, perhaps 0.001%.
Partial cooking *reduces* that risk. There’s no single point where the risk jumps from 1% to 0%. Rather, at some amount of cooking it’s 0.7%. At some amount it’s 0.5%. At some amount it’s 0.3%, 0.1%, 0.01%, etc. It’s not a linear process, so you can’t just say “half cooked means half risk”, but there is some effect from partial cooking.
But ultimately, most of the runny-egg-yolk dishes are simply accepting the risk.
Earlier I said 1% as an example. The actual current estimate of is 1 in 20,000 eggs carrying salmonella, which translates to a 0.005% risk per egg. The average person eats about 300 eggs a year. If you ate *every egg* raw, that would come out to about a 1.5% risk per year of getting salmonella. On average, every person would get salmonella once every 67 years.
Of course those are averages (meaning some people will get “unlucky”) and we’re relatively risk averse. Most people wouldn’t actually want a 1% chance per year of getting salmonella. Still, it means that occasional runny or raw eggs aren’t an incredible risk; they rank *extremely* low on the list of “risky activities”.
It isn’t dangerous to eat. Salmonella can exist on the egg shell though. The danger in something like cookie dough is the flour not the egg.
For safe cookie dough spread the flour on a baking sheet and cook it at 400 degrees for 10 minutes.
Sometime decades ago, salmonella was able to penetrate into the egg itself, as opposed to just being a problem with chicken meat. It’s still fairly rare for it to be in the egg itself, on the order of a few per hundred thousand eggs, but it’s there. Undercooked eggs carry the risk that it’s still there in enough quantity to make you sick, regardless of how the egg is treated, washed, and so on, unless it’s pasteurized.
Runny egg yolk *isn’t* fine. While the risk is slightly lower as much of the egg is cooked, but according to the CDC the leading cause of salmonella in adults is eggs over easy.
And, currently, there is no fully effective vaccine for it. Even if the entire hen population in the US were vaccinated, it would only reduce it, not eliminate. Though it is a current field of study.
That is actually still iffy. Every place I have dined at which has runny yolks has a warning somewhere about undercooked eggs and such with the concerns for those with compromised immune systems.
It’s not. They’re both about equally raw. However, last I looked, the risk of salmonella is 1/20000 eggs.
You’re getting some inaccurate information in this thread. While salmonella can be on the exterior of the shell, it can also get inside the egg before the shell even forms:
“Fresh eggs, even those with clean, uncracked shells, may contain bacteria called Salmonella that can cause foodborne illness, often called “food poisoning.””
https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/what-you-need-know-about-egg-safety#:~:text=Fresh%20eggs%2C%20even%20those%20with,preventing%20illness%20linked%20to%20eggs.
If the egg is removed from the heat as soon as it gets to 149 it won’t keep that temperature for 1:28. It will start dropping pretty much instantly. If you leave it on the heat your temperature will keep increasing beyond your ideal point. You can try to hold it at exactly 149, but most hot holding equipment won’t consistently hold that low. Also the texture of the egg will go to crap.
Pay attention the next time you go to your favorite breakfast spot, any dish with egg will be marked with the same warning as steaks for ordering undercooked foods.
This thread (and some wine) made me wonder how much better off we’d all be if the Bible was full of passages like “The Lord God adviseth that the following set of behaviors doth significantly decrease thy chances of going to Hell”.
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