I did it.
I made chocolate chip cookies the other day.
Most of the dough made it to its intended destination: a plate of warm, soft, golden-brown cookies oozing 60% cacao chocolate chips.
But, I confess, quite a bit of the dough was devoured without ever having come near the oven. What's more, I did what I often do: stuck several cookie dough balls in the freezer—not for later baking, but because, really, frozen cookie dough is sometimes better than the cookies themselves.
Big Brother, in the form of the FDA and other health watchdogs, has been fussing at us for years not to eat raw cookie dough and cake batter because of the minuscule risk that the eggs might be carrying salmonella. Now, thanks to a contaminated batch of General Mills flour, they've upped the threat level: now that pleasure is considered doubly risky, because of the raw flour. So I suppose this means raw bread and biscuit doughs are out, too.
Not for me. I took my better-than-average-sourced eggs and my King Arthur flour and made those cookies. They were delicious, both raw and cooked.
I wish the FDA would spend less time drawing ever-narrowing circles around what we can eat, and more time investigating and improving whatever processes are contributing to food contamination. We don't need to stop consuming raw cookie dough, rare meat, and unpasteurized milk, orange juice, and cider—we need food suppliers whose practices keep our food from becoming contaminated in the first place.
It's a risk, and it's not for everyone. To each his own. I doubt I'll ever go skydiving, and climbing Mt. Everest is not on my bucket list. But I'm with Lenore Skenazy on this one.
