waitwaitwait–Sam–I use the shells to separate eggs. Is bad?
Depends on where you live. In the US, chickens aren’t routinely vaccinated for salmonella, so it’s an issue. But what nobody tells you is that salmonella doesn’t live IN the raw egg, it lives on the shell. You can leave an egg white in a tupperware tub on the shelf for months on end without it incubating bacteria – I know because I’ve done it, it’s something I learned from a chef at the French Pastry School in Chicago.
So if you crack an egg on a flat surface (that doesn’t push the shell shards inwards the way a rim does) and then drop it into the batter, your odds of the egg picking up salmonella are quite low. Whereas if you crack the egg on the rim of a bowl, the odds rise. (Not by much. You’re probably fine.)
And if you use the shell to separate the yolk and white, a lot of the egg comes in contact with the outside of the shell and can pick up nasty bugs, both white and yolk.
Now, here’s the thing: 99% of the time you are baking the eggs at a temperature where none of this matters. The heat will kill the salmonella, and nobody will care. Even if the egg does pick up some salmonella and you eat some raw egg dough, it’s not likely to be enough to make you sick.
But I separated my eggs using the shells and then made candied egg yolk, which involves cooking yolks for a very long time at a very low temperature, and I gave myself EPIC food poisoning because that’s prime bacterial incubation procedure. This can also happen if you’re cooking certain dishes (like Katsudon!) where the egg only soft-cooks and at a relatively low temperature.
So after I puked for a day and a half I got into the habit of separating my eggs using my hands, even when I was going to be hard-cooking them. You break the egg with one hand into the fingers of your other hand (or into a bowl, then pour over your fingers), and the yolk stays put while the white dribbles through. It’s faster and safer as long as you’ve washed your hands before doing it, and the yolk doesn’t break as often.
But if you’re in a country where vaccinations are by law – a country where you can get your eggs on a shelf rather than in the refrigerated case – none of this matters anyway, your eggs are safe. We’re just fucked up in the US because we don’t vaccinate our fucking chickens.
WE CAN PREVENT SALMONELLA AND WE’RE NOT DOING IT????? WHAT????? I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT WAS A DANGER BUT NOT CURRENTLY PREVENTABLE!!!!
LOL no there’s a vaccine. I believe most of Europe currently requires farmers to vaccinate, which also causes the eggs to be shelf-stable. We don’t, I believe because it’s expensive and agricultural lobbies have prevented a vaccination law being passed.
LIFTY I CAN’T EVEN
WOAH.
Back in the day, when I was v. small, I got salmonella poisoning from one egg*. Which was bad (I was only smol).
My mum had two eggs, from the same batch and she got sick too (about the same as I did).
My dad? He’d had the other 9 eggs in the dozen. It was baaaad.
this would have been in the late 80s, right around the whole thing with Edwina Currie and like 10 years before chickens started getting vaccinated.
