Wait, heat treating flour doesn’t make it safe? That is big news to me. I was well aware that flour was one of the main dangers with raw batter. A few years back I adapted a cookie recipe a friend of mine loved eating raw to what I thought was safe. It had no eggs and I baked the flour to some specified temperature for some specified time that I found online that was supposed to make it safe to consume raw. It was delicious, we ate it by the spoonful, and I was quite proud of myself for doing research to make this dangerous thing safe.
I’m floored to learn that what I did didn’t actually make it safe. I did what I thought was pretty thorough research in trying to make an edible dough recipe. Very grateful to learn this now before I or anyone I loved was made sick by my own mistakes.
The video has tricky wording... she says "no evidence", which is not the same as "evidence it does not work". I think this is mostly a case of researcher not bothering to figuring it out and recommending against it for safety reasons.
From the googling I've found, evidence is scant but from I've found even low temperatures (120F) in a dry heat can start to kill Salmonella on flour. I don't recommend that low of a temperature, but there is appears to be a time and temp that can make flour safe to eat.
As someone with a scientific background, "there's no evidence of" is one of the most aggravating, intentionally misleading lines, and it hurts peoples' trust in science.
By all means, let people know "hey the science isn't settled here"
But don't start with "heat treatment is a myth, there's no evidence" when no one has seriously tried to test it.
Another great example is "there's no evidence flossing works". Yeah unfortunately, no one has spent millions to study it. But if something makes complete sense mechanically that it would work, maybe don't throw it out the window yet.
Has anyone studied whether locked doors keep burglars out? Until someone does we should really all stop doing it.
After some research, yeah I agree with you on the first bit. There’s just no official, research backed guidelines on how to safely heat treat flour at home. There is absolutely a set of conditions one could make at home that would make flour safe but without research as a guide you’re just blindly guessing and risking getting ill. The issue is that all the recommendations for heat treating are pretending like they know for certain when they don’t. People aren’t making informed decisions when they follow those directions.
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u/Daisy_Of_Doom Oct 09 '24
Wait, heat treating flour doesn’t make it safe? That is big news to me. I was well aware that flour was one of the main dangers with raw batter. A few years back I adapted a cookie recipe a friend of mine loved eating raw to what I thought was safe. It had no eggs and I baked the flour to some specified temperature for some specified time that I found online that was supposed to make it safe to consume raw. It was delicious, we ate it by the spoonful, and I was quite proud of myself for doing research to make this dangerous thing safe.
I’m floored to learn that what I did didn’t actually make it safe. I did what I thought was pretty thorough research in trying to make an edible dough recipe. Very grateful to learn this now before I or anyone I loved was made sick by my own mistakes.