Can You Kill Salmonella in Eggs Without Cooking Them? I Tried It
Wired · LC · trust 39/100
Courtesy of Williams Sonoma Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story It may finally be safe to eat lettuce again after June’s horrifying—and bagged-salad-trust-destroying —cyclospora outbreak. But the summer of ’26’s foodborne illness train rolls on with a new rash of recalls : for salmonella.
Worried about what’s on your plate? Read more about why salmonella is everywhere , why lettuce is always making people sick , DOGE’s downgrading of the CDC’s cyclospora lab, and how the best food safety prevention tool is a good probe thermometer .
The FDA has reported multi-state salmonella bacteria outbreaks tied to jalapeños , granola , dog food , alfalfa sprouts (also featuring E. coli), and something most people probably have in their refrigerator at this very minute: eggs .
Though the eggs being recalled are only from one supplier, Midwest Poultry Services , they were sold under five brand names, including two distributed by one of the country’s largest grocery chains : Kroger and Simple Truth. While this July recall only concerned Kroger stores in Texas, why wait for the next one?
With the advice of two infectious disease experts, I tested what may be the easiest, most universally applicable way to ensure the eggs in your refrigerator are salmonella-free and safe to use—even in raw or near-raw preparations like Hollandaise and pasta carbonara. All it requires is an immersion circulator, a pot of water, and about an hour and a half of your day.
Salmonella, which can cause fever and severe diarrhea, is not a new problem for eggs.
In fact, “eggs remain the single food commodity most associated with outbreak illnesses,” says Alan Bulbin, director of infectious disease at Catholic Health’s St. Francis Hospital and Heart Center in Roslyn, New York.
Chickens and other poultry commonly carry Salmonella enteritidis , the bacterium most commonly responsible for salmonellosis in people, which can be transferred to the shell from contact with droppings or even deposited inside the egg itself from an infected chicken's ovaries .
It's difficult to tell just by looking if a chicken has salmonella, which is easily transmitted by rodents or wild birds. In fact, at one point, the USDA estimated that 1 out of every 20,000 eggs was thought to be contaminated with salmonella. That means out of the 67 billion eggs produced in the US each year, 3 million eggs could conceivably have dangerous bacteria in or on them. The USDA enacted a 72-page egg safety requirement in 2009 in hopes of eradicating contamination, but clearly, it hasn't happened.
It's good practice to always keep your eggs refrigerated at 42 degrees Fahrenheit or less and wash your hands before and after handling. It's also worth noting that cooking eggs kills salmonella bacteria. As long as your eggs are “cooked thoroughly, with a firm yolk and white,” according to Bulbin, salmonella shouldn't be a concern.
But what if you (like me) have kids who cook for themselves, who you know for a fact will never wash their hands after handling eggs? And more commonly, what if you're not fully cooking the eggs? Many recipes, from mayonnaise and aiolis to eggnog and royal icing for cookies, call for eggs that will be consumed uncooked. How can you make sure they're safe to use?
Photograph: Lisa Abelar While in-shell eggs aren't pasteurized, all liquid eggs are—the kind in the carton. However, these are just egg whites, not yolks, which means they won't work for many of the above recipes.
If you want to be certain a whole, raw shell egg is free of bacteria, the only way to ensure this is to pasteurize it, which means heating the egg for a long period of time at 130 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but not cooking it . Because this is tricky, the vast majority of eggs sold in the US are not pasteurized—if they are, you'll know it, as they're more expensive and the carton will indicate as much.
However, there is a way you can pasteurize your own eggs at home—any store-bought eggs, or ones from your backyard flock—with a simple kitchen tool that happens to also make a mean steak or vegetable side dish.
Sous vide immersion circulators actually originated in laboratory settings as a way to incubate cultures and sterilize testing equipment, but chefs discovered them in the 1970s and ’80s as a solution to easily overcooked foods like vegetables and chicken. Vacuum-sealing a chicken breast and letting it cook gently in a water bath results in meat that stays juicy and tender instead of stringy or rubbery.
Part of the challenge with pasteurization is maintaining a precise and consistent temperature without producing a hard- or soft-boiled egg, since eggs cook quickly. (It's also worth noting that pasteurizing eggs denatures the proteins, and so will affect egg whites’ performance —don't expect to be making any pasteurized-egg soufflés or pavlovas.)
I attempted to pasteurize some eggs I bought at Costco using the 3.0 immersion circulator model from Anova, a company that WIRED reviewer Joe Ray says has been “building water baths for the industrial and scientific community since 2003, and circulators since 2007.” He gave this model's predecessor a 9/10 rating in 2013, praising its touchscreen and dishwasher-safe parts.
Though Bulbin said he does not have direct experience with an immersion circulator, he added that it is possible to use it to kill salmonella if used for long enough. “If used correctly,” says Bulbin, “salmonella can be killed in eggs; however, the egg center must be maintained at a similar temperature to pasteurization (135 degrees) for close to one hour. The ‘come up’ time for the circulator to reach the appropriate temperature does not count and will not kill salmonella.”
Photograph: Kat Merck Photograph: Kat Merck Sous Vide Solution With this “come up” time in mind, I set the eggs' time in the circulator bath for 90 minutes—the same time recommended by Anova and Serious Eats , and deemed “sufficient”…
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