You're Not Supposed To Eat Raw Flour And This Is Why

Some people like to live their lives on the edge, like eating raw cookie dough or cake batter straight from the mixing bowl before it's been baked. If you're known to scoop a dollop of chocolate chip cookies in the raw into your mouth, you've probably heard a response from a real party pooper that sounds like, "Ew, don't do that! Eating raw eggs can give you Salmonella!" While it's true that unpasteurized raw eggs carry a risk, many don't know that the raw flour in that delicious cookie dough can be just as risky to consume.

You may not think of flour as raw, but that's just what it is. No part of the process of harvesting, grinding, bleaching, or packing most types of flour heats it enough to kill bacteria that may be present; cooking it takes care of that. But if you don't cook your flour before consuming, you're putting yourself at risk of food poisoning from Salmonella or E. coli, according to the FDA.

If you've never had food poisoning, consider yourself lucky. Symptoms can include stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and fever, and they can last for a few hours up to a few days. You may need to seek medical help if symptoms last longer than three days, you aren't able to keep liquids down, or you have a very high fever. It feels really unfair that something as delicious and seemingly innocent as a bit of raw cookie dough or cake batter could make you that sick, but that's the unfortunate reality we live in. Luckily, there are some ways to make your "raw" cookie dough safe to eat, if it means that much to you.

Cookie dough ice cream is one of the most popular flavors, and if you'll recall, we collectively went through a bit of a phase where scoops of cookie dough were being served like ice cream out of storefronts around the country. That must mean there's a way to make raw cookie dough safe to eat, right? Right.

Perhaps the most obvious method is to bake your flour so it's no longer raw. You can toast it in an oven or use the microwave method to make your raw flour safe to eat. In order for flour to be free of potentially harmful bacteria, it has to reach a temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. If you want to use the oven technique, spread it on a baking sheet and heat it in your oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, stirring and checking the flour's temperature every two minutes until you hit that ideal number on the thermometer.

Then, to be extra cautious, replace the eggs in your edible cookie dough recipe with a liquid. Milk or water will provide the moisture that the eggs give the dough. The fact that raw flour is potentially dangerous really is a bad news, good news kind of situation. It seems like a catastrophe, but luckily, there is a very straightforward, easy solution. If only all of life's problems were like that!