What replaces butter?

Well, it's been a couple of days, and I haven't gotten sick, so I guess I got lucky.

And really? Never heard of "cookie dough ice cream"? Didn't have a childhood perhaps?

Actually, I suspect the number affected was very low. Most people BAKE their cookie dough into COOKIES. That's the intended use for this product. Baking it into cookies will kill anything alive in it, which makes the odds of getting sick from it pretty small -- unless you recontaminate the cookies after baking.

A small number of people eat frozen cookie dough like ice cream. Kind of like using a loaded gun as a hammer, and blaming S&W for what comes after.

I used to see more in-shell pasteurized eggs. They seem to have fallen out of favor. Any carton egg product is pasteurized. I'm confused about the availability of irradiated eggs. Some sources say they are not yet approved for sale in the U.S., while other sources say they are available and on sale. I've never seen them.

And Facebook shows you to be the picture of good nutrition and health yourself! Cheers!

@Maous: Most people are too stupid to get through the day without assistance.

I find it hard to believe that most people would even know that E.Coli was not Emily, that nice Italian lady from down the street. The one that lives next to the Monellas, Sal and his wife Judy.

Or ground up flax seeds with water.

I don't think you've tried enough vegan baked goods.

Time to go return them, I guess....

Unfortunately, though, that doesn't prove that we'll never get sick, it just proves we've probably been lucky on which eggs we've used.

You can't mimic the same crumb and texture of egg-containing cookie dough without the eggs, which is why they are considered essential to many baked goods.

It always surprises me that vegan cookie recipes or vegan egg substitutes will involve ingredients that do not add any of the properties of eggs to a baked good. Or, that they will have no attempt for a substitution of any kind.

Cookie dough is great. You can always make your own without the eggs to reduce the salmonella risk too, thats what i usually do.

"Unlike eggborne salmonellosis of past decades, the current epidemic is due to intact and disinfected grade A eggs. Salmonella enteritidis silently infects the ovaries of healthy appearing hens and contaminates the eggs before the shells are formed.

Most types of Salmonella live in the intestinal tracts of animals and birds and are transmitted to humans by contaminated foods of animal origin. Stringent procedures for cleaning and inspecting eggs were implemented in the 1970s and have made salmonellosis caused by external fecal contamination of egg shells extremely rare. However, unlike eggborne salmonellosis of past decades, the current epidemic is due to intact and disinfected grade A eggs. The reason for this is that Salmonella enteritidis silently infects the ovaries of healthy appearing hens and contaminates the eggs before the shells are formed."

@Red_Eye: @sirwired: If they use pasteurized eggs, then I suspect that the E.Coli is introduced somewhere else in the process.
Remember the Peanut Company of America's E.Coli scare? The bacteria got introduced after the roasting process, which would have killed it off.

(FWIW I licked many a spoon in my formative years and never dropped dead of salmonella, but that's not exactly scientific data.)

@ChuckECheese: substitute egg beaters or similar, which are pasteurized egg white products.

That's what I was thinking of. It's not that big of a stretch for a big industrial consumer that's making huge batches of cookie dough to use ready-made and pasterized egg mix, whether it's just the whiles or not. You can even get egg beaters today with yolk in it.

Getting a dishwasher is one of the best things I've ever done for kitchen hygiene. The less I'm dependent on my lazy washing, the better off we all are.

E. Coli is also almost unheard of in the food here; an outbreak only strikes every once in a while; in a country of 300+ M people, that's not bad.

Egg products are another matter, and they're required by U.S. law to be pasteurized.

Significant E-Coli should NEVER been in food, hence the recall. It indicates severe contamination during the production process.

SirWired

This makes the 2 for 1 sale that Publix has been running for the last 2 weeks a little suspicious in my mind.

Now I have to truck those 2 logs of never-to-be chocolate chip cookies back to the store for a refund.

Of cour@Dooley: @Dooley: I've not read the ingredients on the packages, as I've never bought it before. Are you sure they make the dough with raw eggs? I would think they would use pasteuized eggs such as the kind mixed and sold in a carton and used by food service.

People let raw food touch surfaces all the time and then cross-contaminate. And don't scrub.

(And I confess that even knowing this, my post-chicken-rinsing scrubbing of the sink is sometimes a little perfunctory.)

Also, cookie dough ice cream doesn't have raw eggs in it.

Okay, maybe it wasn't three months. I didn't keep track -- I just threw it out when it started looking weird. But the tub was around for a long time.

Did any of those 25 get sick by eating only the COOKED product?

Kitchen hygiene, not pre-market sterilization, is your defense against salmonella.

Eat AROUND the green fur, people. It's just common sense.

They're not routinely pasteurized, either. Your protection against salmonella is your own kitchen hygiene, not pre-market treatment.

@cc82: Not...Lick...The...Spoon?
MONSTER!

@feckingmorons: It's probably intended to be funny, not malicious.
Most people do know that you can't SEE e. coli floating in your tub'o'dough.

@LegoMan322: And because you saw it here, why do you think it's NOT photoshopped? What conclusion did you reach about what that green thing might be?

@JuliB: If you make it at home, I really doubt that. Unless you have unsanitary livestock running amok in your kitchen.
E. Coli isn't found in raw eggs, as far as I know.

Consumerist, you do a genuine public service here. I would have never heard of this recall except for reading this blog. I will now go stick my finger down my throat to barf up the 4 blobs of raw dough I just had for breakfast.

Hope I don't become bulimic because of this!

Though I think the company's focusing on the risk of contamination during prep, anyway, so how long you bake the cookies is less significant than how many things you touch after you've formed them.

Extremely slow action, no action at all, same difference.

@LegoMan322: I think it is photoshopped. That hand looks to be George Harrison's and he's been dead for years.

uh Boyfriend, if you are reading this, I make all cookies from scratch. I even churn the butter... I swear.

@NerdBurger_GitEmSteveDave: Trash-eaters always run that risk.

@Hoss: It is also very misleading to consumers. It gives the impression that the bacterial colony is huge, when in fact it it very small.

The bacteria would not be visible to the unaided eye. In this image the thumb would only be 2 microns wide.

I feel it is very misleading in that consumers may feel that if they do not see bacteria their food is safe to eat, which is most assuredly not the case with Escherichia coli contamination as in this instance.

I would urge Consumerist.com to remove the image post haste.

I can sell you some with little tin-foil hats...

@Nidabriz: I love the FDA. Are they going to recommend I throw away all of the raw meat in my house for the same reason?

It's like those darn French have a different word for everything!

@balthisar: You forget about those that dip their fingers into that tub of cookie dough to scoop it out and eat it raw, licking each finger individually and making kind of a slurping/popping sound.

@balthisar:

First there was the Cookie Monster...Now there is the Cook E. Coli.

UM NUM NUM NUM NUM!!!

@Etoiles: Most cookie dough ice cream these days uses cookie dough without egg.

And seriously, who has a tub of cookie mix for more than 3 months?

How hard did you look before you reached the conclusion that Nestle has done nothing?

@zigziggityzoo:

Raw eggs carry an extremely small risk of salmonella. They receive small doses of radiation prior to hitting grocery store shelves.

That said, it doesn't have much to do with the E.coli here, but still. When you eat cookie dough by the spoonful, which many people do (see also: the rise of Cookie Dough ice cream in the last 10-20 years), you're eating the eggs raw.

@FooSchnickens:

...and their arch enemy Sal Monella

Toll House lawyers are not going to like the photoshop pic of their product with a giant sized e coli They will say the pic is meant to develop a negative impression of the Toll House name. Just guessing

@Zegridathes: I think there's a label on the tub-o'-dough that says something to the effect of "Don't eat this shit without cooking the shit out of it." You know, so you don't get Rick and/or his friend E. coli. I think E. coli is just nature's new Darwinian tactic to rid the world of nitwits.

To put it another way, if you think it's stupid to use raw eggs for baking, what do you recommend as a substitute: Fried eggs or hard boiled? And what do you recommend as a substitute for the raw egg you fried or boiled? So on and so forth...

And it's salmonella that is the usual concern with raw eggs, not E coli.

@Zegridathes: I thought the same thing until I read this (from the FDA warning page):
Cooking the dough is not recommended because consumers might get the bacteria on their hands and on other cooking surfaces.

Uh-oh, so this means that green cookie dough I ate last night WASN'T mint chocolate chip ?

@jaya9581: Yea, I like how the FDA says "throw it away" which means, if you like this product then you'll have to go out and buy more (of a different batch). Now E Coli is a great way to increase sales....

Salmonella I can understand but E. Coli!? *shudders*

No more bathroom breaks during work hours! (haha wouldn't that be an interesting place to work)

It was a little annoying to have to read five different sites to find this info. Consumerist, you should update your page to include that information.

I for one will keep eating raw dough (although, not the Nestle dough currently in my fridge!). I've eaten/tasted raw dough for my entire 27 years, as have every member of my family and friends, and I don't know anyone that's gotten sick from it.

I get that the company must have the warning, that's fine, but it's sort of like restaurants refusing to cook burgers rare or medium rare: it's alarmist and the small number of people who actually get sick don't warrant ruining it for everyone else.

Isn't this always a concern with cookie dough given that it contains raw eggs? Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't it still be safe if you actually baked the cookies?

"At least 25 people have been hospitalized since March."

So how much of the cookie dough is left in the 3 months it took to warn the public?

Is he related to Korgoth of Barbaria?

This has the makings of an awesome TV show.

Of course, with an e.coli strain that large, you'd think it would be obvious...