Whasit?

[Andy M.]

Originally Posted by FrankZ

One of the things I have noticed (of late) is some warnings about contact of the white and yolks of eggs with the outside shell. The warnings are for using raw or lightly cooked eggs (mayo, hollandaise, etc) and not when you are fully cooking the egg...

Do not fear the shell. A salmonella contamination will be inside the egg too. So don't be concerned about the possibility of introducing contamination with a piece of shell.

[FrankZ]

What, me worry?

I was looking at some recipes this morning and saw it a couple times. So I thought I would mention it and feed the paranoia beast.

[Andy M.]

Originally Posted by FrankZ

What, me worry?

I was looking at some recipes this morning and saw it a couple times. So I thought I would mention it and feed the paranoia beast.

...and re-invigorate the "just to be on the safe side" folks.

[FrankZ]

You do wear (food safe) nitrile gloves while handling raw ingredients doncha?

[Andy M.]

Originally Posted by FrankZ

You do wear (food safe) nitrile gloves while handling raw ingredients doncha?

Goes without saying...

[taxlady]

Originally Posted by Andy M.

Do not fear the shell. A salmonella contamination will be inside the egg too. So don't be concerned about the possibility of introducing contamination with a piece of shell.

Now you have me wondering. It would certainly be true at a small farm. If there is salmonella in the feces of the bird, which would get the salmonella onto the shell, the bird would be infected and likely so would the eggs. But, if the bird had only recently gotten infected, maybe it wouldn't be getting into the eggs yet.

Also, a great deal of the micro-organisms that shouldn't be in our food comes from contamination at the commercial facilities. (E.g., one contaminated cow is dipped in the same cooling water as fifty previously uncontaminated cows.)

I wonder if the outsides of eggs get contaminated at commercial facilities.

So, I guess there is a small possibility of an exception to what Andy wrote, but I doubt that it would occur more than once in a blue moon.

[Greg Who Cooks]

Originally Posted by FrankZ

One of the things I have noticed (of late) is some warnings about contact of the white and yolks of eggs with the outside shell.

Or all the warnings about consuming raw eggs themselves. One of the frequent snacks my mom fixed me as a kid was egg nog (milk, raw egg, sugar, vanilla) and I had them countless times, never died once or even got sick. If we followed absolutely every health warning we'd die of starvation.

[GLC]

The ultimate safe food is obviously that you raise/grow yourself under healthy conditions. I don't have any worry at all about my eggs, laid by my chickens. They run the pasture all day and are no more likely to become diseased than a kid playing in the dirt. (The lack of which - playing in the dirt - is likely responsible for the fact that every third kid is miserably allergic to something, a situation unheard of my youth, before children were condemned by their ridiculous parents to being raised entirely indoors.) And my immune system is in nice shape and can handle routine exposures.

But as to the outside of commercial eggs, whatever the chickens are voiding will cross-contaminate, but commercially produced eggs in the U.S. are washed in detergent and 120F water. (Although in Ireland, Grade A eggs, the only kind that can be sold retail, are NOT to be washed.) Given conditions in our commercial egg plants, it's probably good they're washed, although I suspect it's more an appearance issue. (Free range and pasture eggs get visibly dirtier than commercial eggs, but it's a "clean" dirt.)

Besides, dirt is good for you. Mycobacterium vaccae, a soil microbe, is now thought to improve you mood by targeting the same serotonin producing centers addressed by Prozac. They also help correct allergies by strengthening the immune system. Get dirty - Be happy.

[Greg Who Cooks]

I was going to mention that. Anybody who has ever seen freshly laid eggs knows that supermarket eggs are washed, even if only for aesthetic reasons.

IMO our food production facilities are getting too centralized. Somebody gets food poisoning from eggs and they recall eggs in two dozen states. Somebody gets food poisoning from ground beef and they recall ground beef coast to coast. We didn't have such serious problems when our food sources were more regional. I buy a chicken these days and chances are it's been more places in its life than I have.

And I certainly agree that there is too much phobia about dirt. I've heard overprotection of children from dirt may harm immune system development--I think this is probably a controversy.

[Addie]

When we moved from the farm and started to buy store bought eggs, I was amazed that chickens laid clean eggs with no poo or dirt on them.