I notice that salmonella in eggs is back in the news again (apparently due to imported EU eggs).
Published recipes and Food Standards Agency advice have always warned vunerable groups (such as pregnant women, very young children and the elderly) against eating raw eggs for as long as I remember (completely taking the joy out of licking the bowl out after cake-baking).
I always look for the Lion Mark before buying an egg, but apparently we still virtually have to treat raw eggs as a toxic substance, so why are we not falling over aisles worth of pasteurized eggs in the supermarket?
After all, you can’t buy unpasteurized milk for love nor money these days – supposedly too risky for the average consumer. I know that pasteurized eggs don’t just come in powdered form, because I’ve seen lemon curd with the ingredients “pasteurized egg (fresh)”. A company in the US has started marketing pasteurized eggs in their shells, so it’s obviously possible, but nothing on the shelves of my local Sainsburys.
Anyone know how they actually pasteurize an egg? Is it prohibitively expensive or difficult? Is the flavour/quality radically affected by pasteurizing them? It just seems such an obvious solution to the problem, to me.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Tiz // 21st Jun 2006 at 4:19 pm
Well I’d guess that if you pasteurise an egg it becomes hard boiled. OK if you are mixing the egg yolk and white up and making powder, not so good if you want to be able to make scrambled, fried or use the egg in a cake!
2 Pewari // 21st Jun 2006 at 6:46 pm
Why though? Pasturizing milk doesn’t cook the milk?
3 Tiz // 21st Jun 2006 at 11:20 pm
Hmm, missed the bit about the American company first time I read your blog. I just assumed that whilst you can warm milk and let it cool without changing it (too much) if you warmed an egg it would set!
4 Pewari // 22nd Jun 2006 at 7:08 am
LOL… it’s still bizarre though, don’t you think? I can only assume that it’s physically much more complicated to pasturize an egg and that’s why its not commonplace. We’re so nanny-stateish in this country I would have thought EVERY egg would be pasturized by now otherwise…
5 Dom // 23rd Jun 2006 at 1:38 pm
Heating milk just makes it hot. Heating eggs makes them cooked. :)
The American web site says their method is patented. I imagine it’s *extremely* difficult to pasteurize eggs without cooking them – you need to heat them above 60C to kill bacteria, so it’s going to be very difficult to control. Depending on their patent, it might be pretty much impossible to replicate the process.
You could try irradiated eggs, but apparently they’re vitamin defficient and make you glow in the dark and sprout extra limbs.
6 Amy // 7th Sep 2006 at 11:56 pm
you apparently have to heat eggs above 160c to kill salmonella etc,
pasteurisation is a heat treatment, at least for milk. However, I read an article in which it said that they have developed a form of heat treatment which pasteurizes eggs in their shells without cooking them – http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/index.asp?PageID=424&subsection=&Year=2000&NewsID=143
however i’ve never seen any sign of them either!
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