Tuesday, 12/9

Okay. Maybe I lied just a little bit.

When I was writing about making Christmas cookie dough yesterday I mentioned that I practiced safe baking, in that I wash my hands quite q bit while baking. And that's true, especially when handling things like raw eggs.

However...when making the dough I, of course, wanna make sure it's okay. I wanna make sure it's turning out the way I want it to turn out, and I wanna make sure that there's nothing untoward about it. After all, I'm giving most (if not all) of these cookies away, and like any good baker I need to make sure they're gonna be edible. So when the dough's done, I grab a spoonful and taste it, to make sure that it's good to go.

That's right. Despite all the warnings, despite all the advice of experts, I eat raw cookie dough. So maybe the use of the phrase “safe baking” wasn't 100% accurate.

Maybe.

Yes, I know you're not supposed to eat raw cookie dough, especially raw cookie dough that has raw eggs mixed into it. I know that you can theoretically get all kinds of food-borne illnesses from consuming even one microgram of raw cookie dough. Heck, even the bag of flour I was using told me not to eat the flour raw, whether it was in cookie dough or not. But apparently I like being a rebel. Apparently I like living on the edge. And that was quite apparent last night when I made four kinds of cookie dough and ate four bites of the raw stuff.

And yet, I'm still alive.

Now, I know that it's probably a bad thing to do. I'm aware of what kind of organisms can lurk in uncooked foods. And I wouldn't eat a piece of raw chicken or even, like Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky”, quaff an entire raw egg. But I've been eating small samples of raw cookie dough since I started baking cookies as a kid. And not once in those 40+ years have I gotten sick from it. Sure, the possibility of barfing all over the kitchen exists, but the amount of “dangerous” material in a tiny bite of raw cookie dough is probably so small that I don't have to worry. Either that, or I can apparently ingest all kinds of toxic material and not be affected by it.

Unless, of course, I turn into a nuclear-powered super hero (or evil villain). Then I'll know I WAS affected by it.

But I understand why experts (and even flour bags) warn you NOT to eat raw cookie dough. I'm sure some fool out there once made cookie dough using 14 eggs and four-year old flour, ate it all in one sitting, blew their stomach out, and sued the food manufacturers for not telling them not to do it. After all, that's the American way. But having one small bite, just to make sure it tastes up to standards? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing to do. Like I said, call me a contrarian, but I've been doing it since I started baking cookies, and I'm guessing I won't be stopping any time soon.

(jim@wmqt.com), bad boy of baking.