Ummmm….No. Don’t Eat That.
Mr. Orange–
We made about four times as much Caesar Salad dressing as we should have last week. It’s been in the fridge ever since. Do you think it’s still safe to eat?
If you followed the traditional Caesar Salad dressing recipe calling for raw egg yolks, then, no, you shouldn’t eat it unless you’re looking to make friends with Sal Monella.
Next time you make Caesar dressing, try substituting hard boiled egg yolks for the raw yolks. Even cooked, the egg yolks maintain their emulsificating abilities, and will yield a silky-smooth dressing that is safe to store and use over a several day period, thereby eliminating the need to make your homemade Caesar dressing to order. Simply mash the yolks into a paste with some olive oil, and follow the standard Caesar recipe from there. For a tasty treat, crumble the egg whites on top of your salad.
December 22nd, 2009 at 11:15 pm
What makes you say that? I’m not saying it’s necessarily safe to eat, but why would raw egg yolks in the fridge be any more dangerous than raw eggs in the fridge? Also, only about one in 20,000 eggs is infected with salmonella, so it’s far from certain that you’ll get sick from eating this.
December 26th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Call it a ‘gut’ instinct. There’s a much better chance that the shells of the egg have salmonella, especially if the eggs were (as most are) produced in a n egg factory where the hens are kept in extremely close confinement. Use of the shell to separate the yolk from the albumen connects the yolk with a potential source of bacteria. From there, expose it to oxygen and give it time to reproduce…. There’s not a 100% certainty of the salad dressing being tainted. But 100% certainties are few and far between. And with the number of factors present that could contribute to a bacterial culture thriving, I could not in good conscience tell anyone that I believe it to b e safe to eat. Knowing what I do, I wouldn’t eat it, therefore, I’d counsel others to be cautious, too.
January 9th, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Well - I actually did some research on this and discovered that even though salmonella tends to infect the white in eggs in the shell (when it’s even present at all), mixing the yolk and white together will cross-contaminate the yolk and provide a more nourishing environment for bacteria to grow. So if you just mix eggs together, I probably wouldn’t keep them for more than a few days in the fridge.
HOWEVER, that’s heavily mitigated by the fact that the acidity of a proper Caesar dressing will do a lot to sterilize it. This is the same reason you’ve never heard of anyone getting sick from homemade mayo. In order for that to work, though, counter to most people’s instincts, you have to leave it out on the counter at room temperature for an hour or so. Acidity won’t kill bacteria if it’s too cold.
I mean, sure - if you throw it out you definitely won’t get sick from it, but I don’t think eating it is an undue risk (unless you’re immunocompromised for some reason).
January 9th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Also, I think it very much depends on how old the eggs were when you used them. For eggs collected in the past week, I’d have no qualms about eating this at all. If they’ve been sitting around for a month, I’d hestitate more.
January 13th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Adam… your last point is I think the most important. For eggs collected in the past week, that involves getting eggs directly from the farmer to know when they were collected. Any eggs bought from the supermarket should be assumed to be at least a month old when purchased. It was the standard supermarket egg that I specifically had in mind when providing my original answer, so I think that when we boil it down to that differentiation, we are actually pretty much in agreement. though, I will also admit to not having verified with the individual asking the question where the eggs were purchased.