14
votes
Testing starch slurries in eggs, to enable cooking omelettes all the way through while still keeping them moist
Link information
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- Title
- The Egg Problem No Chef Has Ever Cracked...
- Authors
- Alex
- Duration
- 11:56
- Published
- Jul 8 2023
He kinda touched on it but the "notoriously undersafe" is more "notorious" than actually unsafe. Most eggs don't have salmonella anymore. Not all eggs, but like he mentioned in the video, many people eat raw eggs. The salmonella scare was more of a period thing, but it stuck around in the consciousness of many people.
You can also pasteurize your eggs, either by buying then pasteurized or doing it yourself with a sous vide machine.
But realistically if you like your eggs moist, and your concern is salmonella, lean towards "undercooked".
I strongly endorse your comments about it being more notorious than notoriously unsafe.
Even the CDC acknowledges that only about one in 20,000 eggs carries salmonella.
That seems... high. I tried to find a equivalent statistics for the EU but my stats finding skills are -2000 it appears. Would be interesting to compare.
Control of Salmonella page from the European Commission refers to the Annual zoonoses monitoring reports on the European Food Safety Authority webpage.
That's the 2018 report though, so we search and find the latest The European Union One Health 2021 Zoonoses Report (EFSA journal, web viewer)
On page 56, in section 2.4.3. "Salmonella in food", in Table 19 "Occurrence of Salmonella in the main food categories, EU, 2021 and 2017-2020", we find for for non-ready-to-eat (RTE) "Egg and egg products" that in 2021, 6501 units were sampled, of which 53 (0.82%) were positive.
The paper also links to a Salmonella dashboard where you can select "Units tested of major food categories" and select the food category "Egg and egg products". Filtering on non-RTE food only, for 2021 we see 14639 samples, of which 77 (0.53%) were positive.
I'm not sure why there's a difference in the data, but that should give a good estimate of the prevalence of Salmonella in eggs and egg products within the EU.
EDIT: For context, my initial search query was "prevalence of salmonella in eggs european union"
This is a reasonable article about the situation in the UK. It doesn't give stats for food poisoning from eggs, but it gives some hints about chicken products.
https://viva.org.uk/health/global-health-threats/factory-farms-a-breeding-ground-for-disease/salmonella-are-eggs-really-safe/
People selling equipment to comply with the comprehensive safety standards are also a good source of information: https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/food/salmonella-free-uk-lion-mark-eggs-runny-eggs-for-all/
There's almost certainly lots of data from Public Health England (now split up, the relevant org is the new UK Health Security Agency but there's so much disruption with constant reconfiguration that I've lost contacts with all the people I know who used to work there. Public Health officials are great though - they really do want to communicate information about food poisoning so people can make informed choices and there's a lot of stuff that happens to make eggs safe and people want you to know about it.
To add to this, only those who have poor or compromised immune systems would actually be at risk of serious complications from contracting salmonella, in the extremely unlikely event that it even occurred.
Like @stu2b50 said, it's just not that big of a concern.
Raw eggs get used for so much. Mayonnaise, hollandaise, aioli, chocolate mousse, egg nog, steak tartare, cheesecake, tiramisu... these are all staples of kinda-fine dining. Not to mention the cocktails with raw egg, sukiyaki hot pot, soft-boiled eggs, etc
You certainly need to be more careful, like not leaving raw egg products "out" for too long, frequently making batches, etc.
I do feel like the post title has detracted focus from the video itself - which is about using starch slurries while cooking an omelette, to enable cooking it all the way through while keeping it moist. The health rammification is only very briefly considered.
Yeah, I really regret using the video description for the topic title due to how many people made comments focusing entirely on the title rather than the video contents. But the original video title itself was even more clickbaity. :(
I changed the topic title, since so many people have been focusing solely on that "unsafe" part of it, which was only very briefly mentioned in the video, and was not its main focus at all. That's totally my bad though. I shouldn't have used the original video description for the title since it wasn't a very good description. The orginal video title wasn't much better either though. :(
p.s. Thanks for the better title idea, @DefiantEmbassy
I honestly think raw/undercooked eggs are not a risk. Back in my home country, "homemade mayonnaise" was banned for a while because of salmonella risks, but ultimately, it was decided that it was safe enough to once again allow the sales of products made with raw egg, as the risks have proven themselves to be minimal.
I'm surprised he didn't remake the omelette. Maybe I'm vain. His previous ones were far better, though.
IIRC chickens in the UK are inoculated against salmonella since the scare here