What you need to know about eating raw eggs at home and at restaurants

By Jim Romanoff (CP) - February 23, 2010  Canadian Press

Peanut butter recalls. Spinach scares. Contaminated meat.

Is it any wonder Americans are jittery about their food? So much so that
when The Associated Press recently ran a recipe for traditional
spaghetti carbonara - complete with its only barely cooked egg - emails
poured in.

Had we forgotten the step in the recipe about cooking the egg?

No. But it did make us wonder. With so many traditional recipes calling
for uncooked egg - mayonnaise, caesar salad, eggnog, carbonara, never
mind the simple joy of dunking toast in soft-boiled eggs - what can we
safely do with raw eggs?

Simply put, raw eggs can carry salmonella, bacteria that can cause
serious food poisoning, even death. But to be fair, any raw food can be
contaminated. After all, salmonella is what triggered the massive peanut
butter recall last year.

The Food and Drug Administration is pretty clear on the matter, telling
people eggs should be fully cooked until both the yolks and the whites
are firm. They tell people not to eat or even taste any foods that may
contain raw or undercooked eggs.

Of course the risks are highest among the very young, the very elderly
and people who are pregnant or have a compromised immune system, says
Catherine Donnelly, a professor and expert on the microbiology of food
safety at the University of Vermont. Health Canada reiterates these
risks on its website.

Healthy adults may get sick from salmonella, but Donnelly says they are
unlikely to die.

Still, not dying is a pretty low bar to set for dinner. Is it worth it?

Charles Reeves, chef and owner of Penny Cluse Cafe, a restaurant in
Burlington, Vt., known for its from-scratch breakfasts and lunches,
certainly thinks so.

"You can't own a restaurant and call yourself a chef if you're using
mayonnaise out of a bottle," he says. "It's just too easy to make it
better yourself."

In Reeves' kitchen, the ubiquitous dressing (made with raw yolks and
sometimes the whites) is prepared daily and used on numerous sandwiches.
Raw eggs also show up in the base for several other dressings and
sauces.

Though his customers' safety is a primary concern, Reeves doesn't think
twice about using raw eggs, including serving them over easy and sunny
side up.

"You just always have to use absolutely fresh eggs that come from a
reputable source," he says.

But Todd Pritchard, a food scientist at the University of Vermont, says
farm fresh doesn't necessarily mean bacteria free.

"Bacteria are blind," he says. "They don't see whether the eggs come
from a local farmer or are free-range or organic."

Much depends on how the eggs and chickens have been handled, says
Pritchard. An unhealthy chicken can have salmonella in its reproductive
tract and the bacteria can end up on the shell or even inside the egg.

Luckily, says Donnelly, the egg industry got serious during the '90s
about salmonella.

Working closely with federal agriculture officials, major egg producers
removed salmonella-infected hens from the laying population. Meanwhile,
probiotics (healthy bacteria) were added to the feed to help make
chickens more resistant to salmonella.

Still, Pritchard says an egg also can be contaminated by an external
source in the barnyard or during the handling and shipping, including
during storage or preparation at a restaurant.

That's part of the reason California and New Jersey during the '90s
banned raw and undercooked eggs from restaurants.

In both states there was a considerable outcry in favour of runny eggs,
and the laws were quickly revised to make it easier for raw and
undercooked eggs to be served as long as customers are informed of the
risk, either on the menu or by a server.

But all of that focus on food service frustrates Nancy Oakes, a James
Beard award-winning chef and owner of San Francisco's Boulevard
Restaurant. She calls the raw egg a "simply magical food."

At Boulevard, Oakes creates aiolis with raw egg yolk, and accompanies
her caesar salad with a soft-cooked egg on the side. She says safety
efforts focus too much on the kitchen, and not enough on the farms where
the eggs are produced.

"It just seems that (the regulators) spend their entire lives trying to
make safety happen in the frying pan rather than at the farm gate or in
the transportation systems where a lot of the problems originate," she
said.

And chefs like Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of Prune restaurant in New
York, has no problem with raw and undercooked eggs as long as customers
are aware of what they are ordering.

"I use them like crazy, for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said Hamilton,
who added that raw or runny yolks are indispensable for adding richness,
as well as for balancing out spicy or acidic foods.

According the American Egg Board, the risk of an egg being contaminated
with salmonella is only around one in 20,000. At this rate, an average
consumer would encounter a contaminated egg once in 84 years.

Pritchard says that for an individual, assessing the risks of consuming
raw eggs isn't so cut and dried. While it's true that the likelihood of
being sickened by an egg is low, it doesn't matter, he points out, if
you're the one who gets sick.

"It really all depends," says Pritchard, "on the immune status of the
individual and the source of the egg."

So what's an egg eater to do?

For adult home cooks in good health, the minute risk of being sickened
may be worth the joy of soft-boiled eggs or homemade mayo. Ditto when
dining out.

Still not so sure?

Health Canada advises that when making foods that don't get cooked and
contain eggs (such as icing, eggnog or caesar salad dressing), use
pasteurized egg products instead of raw eggs.

But the catch with pasteurized egg products is that while whites are
common, yolks are hard to find. And many of these products are made
mostly from egg whites, which don't emulsify or thicken well, so they
won't work well in most dishes that call for raw whole eggs or egg
yolks.

There are pasteurized whole eggs that are heated in the shell in a
low-heat water bath that neutralizes bacteria, but stops short of
cooking the egg, but these can be hard to find.

Copyright (c) 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.