Will It Be Sous Vide? Absolutely Safe Raw Cookie Dough
Hello my friends, and welcome back to yet another sweet piece ofWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column where I do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
Last week, I asked you to come up with some sweet suggestions, and this raw, completely safe cookie dough became the king of Sugar Mountain.
Although I’ve eaten raw cookie dough all my life, recent concerns about flour contamination (and perhaps reaching a dry age of 30) made me a slightly more wary woman, so this project seemed pretty sensible (and delicious). …
Unfortunately, this was not a task that could be done in one package. The flour needs to be heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit to kill any dangerous pathogens lurking around, and as we know from the various egg experiments we’ve done in the past, eggs begin to cook at lower temperatures (around 140 degrees Fahrenheit) … The goal here is delicious uncooked cookie dough, suitable to be eaten in pajamas while watching shitty TV, not scrambled eggs with a cookie dough flavor, I decided to split the process in two.
First we needed to pasteurize the eggs. Submerging raw eggs in a 135-degree Fahrenheit water bath for 75 minutes will eliminate any salmonella that may dangle in and around your eggs, according to this study published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology .
Like all sous vide egg cooking, it was a fairly straightforward process. I just warmed up the bath, carefully put the little guys in there and left. After 75 minutes, I removed them and placed them in an ice bath to stop cooking and allow them to cool completely. When I opened them I noticed that the proteins were a little opaque, but nothing coagulated, so we seem to be fine.
Then it was time to tackle the flour. I set the Anova to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, scooped the required amount of flour into the freezer bag, and threw in some butter knives to make sure it stays submerged. (Pro tip: remember to take out the knives before mixing the rest of the ingredients with the flour!)
I was not sure how long it would take for the flour to heat up to 160 ℉, so I checked the temperature every half hour or so until it reached the target temperature.
- 0:30: 127 ℉
- 1:00: 146 ℉, Good progress.
- 1:30: 150 ℉. We slowed down a lot, so I decided to give it a full hour – just enough to have a drink with my boyfriend and distract him from the very intense Cubs game.
- 2:30: So, there is good news and bad news: The Cubs won, but my flour was only 153.5 ℉. (More good news: I found a bottle of wine that I forgot about!)
- 3:00: 155.4 ℉, by this point I’m drunk and sleepy, and I feel personally attacked by how long it lasts.
- 3:30: 156.7 ℉, I’m going to kill the world.
- 4:00: 160.2 ℉, already well past midnight. I hate sous vide cooking and everything that is.
So I wouldn’t say this is the most efficient way to heat flour, but eventually we got there and now I had perfectly safe flour and eggs to make a perfectly safe cookie dough.
Using the recipe printed on the Nestlé Toll House semi-sweet chocolate chunks package – as I’m pretty straightforward when you got to this point – I mixed a batch of delicious chocolate chip cookie dough and enjoyed it on my morning coffee. (Note: While there was no chemical reason for the inclusion of baking soda, I love the slightly bitter taste it gives and I left it for authenticity.)
It was delicious. (Tastes like cookie dough.)
But returning to everyone’s favorite – even though I was told grammatically incorrectly – the question: will there be raw dough for sous vide cookies?
Answer: I mean yes, but the main takeaway here is how easy it is to pasteurize eggs yourself. There is a much simpler tool in your kitchen for heating flour to 160 ℉, and that is a scientific oven (also known as a “microwave”). I don’t actually have a microwave – I’m disappointed too – so I can’t give you any empirical data on how long it will take, but according to HowToCAKE blog 55 seconds in a 1200W microwave should help you. there. (FIFTY-FIVE DAMN SECONDS.)
So there is no point in watching your flour – it’s just a gigantic, unpleasant waste of energy – but pasteurizing eggs this way has great benefits. While I’ve never personally gotten sick from a raw egg,it can happen , and it’s nice to be able to make an egg, mayonnaise, and raw egg cookie dough that you know won’t ruin your shit, both literally sense. and figuratively.